As long as I live I shall remember that journey along old Providence Road with a lovely nature like Peter’s.  He glowed with his inward flame there at my side, until I felt that it would be bad for him.  Peter has seen all kinds of wonderful scenery all his life; but of course, there is none in the world anything like the Harpeth Valley.  All the other in the world is either grand or placid or swept and garnished and tended or brilliant or moist, but this valley under Paradise Ridge is different.  Peter expressed it so that my throat tightened and I had to hold steadier to the wheel as we passed an old farm wagon.

“It’s the hollow of God’s hand in which He has gathered His children and their homes, Betty,” he said, huskily.  “Look at that white-haired old grand dame in her frilled frock with the string of chickens following her and the two kiddies bringing up the rear.  And look at that old red-gray brick house.  England has nothing finer.”

“That is old Mrs. Georgetta Johnson,” I answered, as I waved my hand and got a stately wave in return.  “She is the fifth generation to live in that house, and the two kiddies are the eighth.  Her mother danced with Lafayette, and she is over eighty-five.  I’ll take you to see her some day.”

“Betty,” said Peter, with positive awe, “I have never seen such homes and furniture and people as I have found here.  What is it that makes it so—­so satisfying?”

“It must be that everything has had time to root here, people and all,” I answered as I again avoided a farm wagon and a negro driving two fine milk-cows with cow babies wobbling along at their flanks.

“Yes,” answered Peter, thoughtfully—­“yes, I should say that ‘rooted’ would about express the life, and I am wondering—­” But just here we turned off into Brier Lane, and Peter went up in the air and began to float among the tree-tops, only being able to take in the high-lights like the gnarled old cedars that jutted out from the lichen-covered stone wall and hung over the moss-green snake-rail fences, or the old oaks which were beginning to draw young, green loveliness around them, or the feathery buckbushes and young hackberries that were harboring all varieties of mating birds who were wooing and flirting and cheeping baby talk in a delightfully confidential and unabashed manner.  Peter had become wildly absorbed in a brilliant scarlet cardinal that followed the car, scolding and swearing in the most pronounced bird language, all for no fault of ours that we could see, when we turned in the cedar-pole gate of The Briers and began to wind our way up through the potato and corn field on one side and the primeval forest on the other.  It was difficult to get Peter past the old thorn-tree view of the Harpeth Valley we had come through, and he wanted to get out and stay for ever at the milk-house; but I finally landed him in a Homeric daze up in front of the house, which stood with its hospitable old door wide open but deserted.