“All I ask,” said Miss Sally Ruth sharply, “is that you’ll read Paul with your eyes open and your mouth shut, and that you’ll keep your clothes in that wardrobe and your moths out of it.  If it was intended for anybody to teach you anything, then Paul will teach you; but it wasn’t intended for a cedar-wood wardrobe to hold moths, and I hope you won’t forget it!”

Major Cartwright sent over a fishing-rod, a large jar of tobacco, and a framed picture of General Lee.

“Because no man, suh, could live under the same roof with even his pictured semblance, and not be the bettah fo’ it,” said the major earnestly.  “I know.  I’ve got to live with him myself.  When I’m fair to middlin’ he’s in the dinin’ room.  When I’ve skidded off the straight an’ narrow path I lock him up in the parlor, an’ at such times I sleep out on the po’ch.  But when I’m at peace with man an’ God I take him into my bedroom an’ look at him befo’ retirin’.  He’s about as easy to live with as the Angel Gabriel, but he’s mighty bracin’, Marse Robert is:  mighty bracin’!”

Thus equipped, John Flint settled himself in his own house.  It had been a wise move, for he had the sense of proprietorship, privacy, and freedom.  He could come and go as he pleased, with no one to question.  He could work undisturbed, save for the children who brought him such things as they could find.  He put his breeding cages out on the vine-covered piazzas surrounding two-sides of his house, arranged the cabinets and boxes which had been removed from my study to his own, nailed up a few shelves to suit himself, and set up housekeeping.

My mother had been frankly delighted to have my creeping friends moved out of the Parish House, and Clelie abated in her dislike of the one-legged man because he had, in a way, removed from her a heretofore never-absent fear of waking up some night and finding a caterpillar under her bed.  More yet, he entailed no extra work, for he flatly refused to have her set foot in his rooms for the purpose of cleaning them.  He attended to that himself.  The man was a marvel of neatness and order.  Mesdames, permit me to here remark that when a man is neat and orderly no woman of Eve’s daughters can compare with him.  John Flint’s rooms would arouse the rabid envy of the cleanest and most scourful she in Holland itself.

Now as the months wore away there had sprung up between him, and Mary Virginia and Laurence, one of those odd comradely friendships which sometime unite the totally unlike with bonds hard to break.  His spotless workroom had a fascination for the youngsters.  They were always in and out, now with a cocoon, now an imago, now a larva, and then again to see how those they had already brought were getting along.