ime we can't see. And whether
we trust or not, child, no matter how dark it is nor how long it stays
dark, the sun's goin' to come out some time, and it's all goin' to be
right at the last. You know what the Scripture says, 'At evening time
it shall be light!'"

Her faded eyes were turned reverently toward the glory of the western
sky, but the light on her face was not all of the setting sun.

"At evening time it shall be light!"

Not of the day but of human life were these words spoken, and with
Aunt Jane the prophecy had been fulfilled.

IX

THE GARDENS OF MEMORY

[Illustration]

Each of us has his own way of classifying humanity. To me, as a child,
men and women fell naturally into two great divisions: those who had
gardens and those who had only houses.

Brick walls and pavements hemmed me in and robbed me of one of my
birthrights; and to the fancy of childhood a garden was a paradise,
and the people who had gardens were happy Adams and Eves walking in a
golden mist of sunshine and showers, with green leaves and blue sky
overhead, and blossoms springing at their feet; while those others,
dispossessed of life's springs, summers, and autumns, appeared darkly
entombed in shops and parlors where the year might as well have been a
perpetual winter.

As I grew older I learned that there was a small subclass composed of
people who not only possessed gardens, but whose gardens possessed
them, and it is the spots sown and tended by these that blossom
eternally in one's remembrance as veritable vailimas--"gardens of
dreams."

In every one's mind there is a lonely space, almost abandoned of
consciousness, the time between infancy and childhood. It is like that
period when the earth was "without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep." Here, like lost stars floating in the
firmament of mind, will be found two or three faint memories, remote
and disconnected. With me one of these memories is of a garden. I was
riding with my father along a pleasant country road. There were
sunshine and a gentle wind, and white clouds in a blue sky. We stopped
at a gate. My father opened it, and I walked up a grassy path to the
ruins of a house. The chimney was still standing, but all the rest was
a heap of blackened, half-burned rubbish which spring and summer were
covering with wild vines and weeds, and around the ruins of the house
lay the ruins of the garden. The honeysuckle, bereft of its trellis,
w