in spring under an apple tree."

"I don' know whah _I_ gwine be married," Milly would say with a hoarse,
careless cackle. "I 'spec' in a brier-patch."

Gabriella's first discovery of what meanness human nature can exhibit
was connected with this garden. So long as everything was sour and
green, she could play there by the hour; but as soon as anything got
ripe and delicious, the gate with the high latch was shut and she could
never enter it unguarded. What tears she shed outside the fence as she
peeped through! When they did take her in, they always held her by the
hand.

"DON'T hold my hand, Sam," pleadingly to the negro gardener. "It's so
HOT!"

"You fall down and hurt yourself."

"How absurd, Sam! The idea of my falling down when I am walking along
slowly!"

"You get lost."

"How can you say anything so amusing as that, Sam! Did I ever get lost
in here?"

"Snakes bite you."

"Why do you think they'd bite ME, Sam? They have never been known to
bite anybody else."

"You scratch yourself."

"How can I scratch myself, Sam, when I'm not doing anything?"

"Caterpillars crawl on you."

"They crawl on me when I'm not in the garden, Sam. So why do you harp
on THAT?"

Slowly they walked on--past the temptations of Eden.

"Please, let me try just once, Sam!"

"Try what, Miss Gabriella?"

"To see whether the snakes will bite me."

"I couldn't!"

"Then take me to see the grapes," she would say wearily.

There they were, hanging under the glass: bunches of black and of
purple Hamburgs, and of translucent Malagas, big enough to have been an
armful!

"Just one, Sam, please."

"Make you sick."

"They never make me sick when I eat them in the house. They are good
for me! One COULDN'T make me sick. I'm sick because you DON'T give it
to me. Don't I LOOK sick, Sam?"

The time came when Gabriella began to extend her knowledge to the
country, as she drove out beside her grandmother in the balmy spring
and early summer afternoons.

"What is that, grandmother?" she would say, pointing with her small
forefinger to a field by the turnpike.

"That is corn."

"And what is that?"

"That is wheat."

"And what is that?"

"Oats, Gabriella."

"Oh, grandmother, what is THAT?"

"Tut, tut, child! Don't you know what that is? That's hemp. That is
what bales all our cotton."

"Oh, grandmother, smell it!"

After this sometimes Gabriella would order the driver to turn off into
some green lane about sunset