That garden reconciled my mother to her exile, for I am afraid she had regarded Appleboro with somewhat of the attitude of the castaway sailor toward a desert island—­a refuge after shipwreck, but a desert island nevertheless, a place which cuts off one from one’s world.  And when at first the poor, uncouth, sullen creatures who were a part of my new charge, 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 unless you knew his pet cats.  You admire that calm and imperturbable dignity, that sphinxlike and yet vigilant poise of bearing which has made Judge Mayne so notable an ornament of the bench?  It is purely feline:  “He caught it from his cats, suh:  he caught every God-blessed bit of it from his cats!”