They haven’t.  And I should hate to think that any Confederate living or dead ever even remotely resembled the gray granite one on our monument.  He is a brigandish and bearded person in a foraging cap, leaning forward to rest himself on his gun.  His long skirted coat is buckled tightly about his waist to form a neat bustle effect in the back, and the solidity of his granite shoes and the fell rigidity of his granite breeches are such as make the esthetic shudder; one has to admit that as a work of art he is almost as bad as the statues cluttering New York City.  But in Appleboro folks are not critical; they see him not with the eyes of art but with the deeper vision of the heart.  He stands for something that is gone on the wind and the names he guards are our names.

This is not irrelevant.  It is merely to explain something that is inherent in the living spirit of all South Carolina; wherefore it explains my Appleboro, the real inside-Appleboro.

Outwardly Appleboro is just one of those quiet, conservative, old Carolina towns where, loyal to the customs and traditions of their fathers, they would as lief white-wash what they firmly believe to be the true and natural character of General William Tecumseh Sherman as they would their own front fences.  Occasionally somebody will give a backyard henhouse a needed coat or two; but a front fence?  Never!  It isn’t the thing.  Nobody does it.  All normal South Carolinians come into the world with a native horror of paint and whitewash and they depart hence even as they were born.  In consequence, towns like Appleboro take on the venerable aspect of antiquity, peacefully drowsing among immemorial oaks draped with long, gray, melancholy moss.

Not that we are cut off from the world, or that we have escaped the clutch of commerce.  We have the usual shops and stores, even an emporium or two, and street lights until twelve, and the mills and factory.  We have the river trade, and two railroads tap our rich territory to fetch and carry what we take and give.  And, except in the poor parish of which I, Armand De Rance, am pastor, and some few wealthy families like the Eustises, Agur’s wise and noble prayer has been in part granted to us; for if it has not been possible to remove far from us all vanity and lies, yet we have been given neither poverty nor riches, and we are fed with food convenient for us.

In Appleboro the pleasant and prejudiced Old looks askance at the noisy and intruding New, before which, it is forced to retreat—­always without undue or undignified haste, however, and always unpainted and unreconstructed.  It is a town where families live in houses that have sheltered generations of the same name, using furniture that was not new when Marion’s men hid in the swamps and the redcoats overran the country-side.  Almost everybody has a garden, full of old-fashioned shrubs and flowers, and fine trees.  In such a place men and women grow old serenely and delightfully, and youth flourishes all the fairer for the rich soil which has brought it forth.