frightened and dismayed her, there was always the
garden to fly to for consolation. If she couldn't plant seeds of order
and cleanliness and morality and thrift in the sterile soil of poor
folks' minds, she could always plant seeds of color and beauty and
fragrance in her garden and be surer of the result. That garden was my
delight, too. I am sure no other equal space ever harbored so many
birds and bees and butterflies; and its scented dusks was the paradise
of moths. Great wonderful fellows clothed in kings' raiment, little
chaps colored like flowers and seashells and rainbows, there the airy
cohorts of the People of the Sky wheeled and danced and fluttered. Now
my grandfather and my father had been the friends of Audubon and of
Agassiz, and I myself had been the correspondent of Riley and Scudder
and Henry Edwards, for I love the People of the Sky more than all
created things. And when I watched them in my garden, I am sure it was
they who lent my heart their wings to lift it above the misery and
overwork and grief which surrounded me; I am sure I should have sunk
at times, if God had not sent me my little friends, the moths and
butterflies.

Our grounds join Miss Sally Ruth Dexter's on one side and Judge
Hammond Mayne's are just behind us; so that the Judge's black Daddy
January can court our yellow Clelie over one fence, with coy and
delicate love-gifts of sugar-cane and sweet-potato pone in season; and
Miss Sally Ruth's roosters and ours can wholeheartedly pick each
other's eyes out through the other all the year round. These are fowls
with so firm a faith in the Mosaic code of an eye for an eye that when
Miss Sally Ruth has six blind of the right eye we have five blind of
the left. We are at times stung by the Mayne bees, but freely and
bountifully supplied with the Mayne honey, a product of fine flavor.
And our little dog Pitache made it the serious business of his life to
keep the Mayne cats in what he considered their proper bounds.

Major Appleby Cartwright, our neighbor to the other side of Miss Sally
Ruth, has a theory that not alone by our fruits, but by our animals,
shall we be known for what we are. He insists that Pitache wags his
tail and barks in French and considers all cats Protestants, and that
Miss Sally Ruth's hens are all Presbyterians at heart, in spite of the
fact that her roosters are Mormons. The Major likewise insists that
you couldn't possibly hope to know the real Judge Hammond Mayne u