“Snap-Bean Farm” was all the world that he cared for, and here he lived and wove his enchantments, not in his well-appointed study, as a thoroughly balanced mind would have done, but all over the house, just where he happened to be, preferably beside the fire after the little ones had gone to bed, leaving memories of their youthful brightness to make yet more glowing the flames, and waves of their warmth of soul to linger in enchantment about the hearth.

It was a sunny, happy day when I visited “Snap-Bean Farm.”  A violet-bordered walk led me to the pretty frame cottage, built upon a terrace quite a distance from the street—­a shady, woodsy, leafy, flowery, fragrant distance—­a distance that suggested infinite beauty and melody, infinite fascination.  When the home was established there, the rumbling and clang of the trolley never broke the stillness of the peaceful spot.  A horse-car crept slowly and softly to a near-by terminus and stopped, as if, having reached Uncle Remus and his woodsy home, there could be nothing beyond worth the effort.  There were wide reaches of pine-woods, holding illimitable possibilities of romance, of legend, of wildwood and wild-folk tradition.  It was a country home in the beginning, and it remained a country home, regardless of the outstretching of the city’s influences.  Joel Chandler Harris had a country soul, and if he had been set down in the heart of a metropolis his home would have stretched out into mystic distances of greenery and surrounded itself with a limitless reach of cool, vibrant, amber atmosphere, and looked out upon a colorful and fragrant wilderness of flowers, and he would have dwelt in the solitudes that God made.

As I walked, a fragrance wrapped me around as with a veil of radiant mist.  It came straight from the heart of his many-varied roses that claimed much of his time and care.  The shadow of two great cedar trees reached protecting arms after me as I went up to the steps of the cottage hidden away in a green and purple and golden and pink tangle of bloom and sweet odors; ivy and wistaria and jasmine and honeysuckle.  Beside the steps grew some of his special pet roses.  Their glowing and fragrant presence sometimes afforded him a congenial topic of discourse when a guest chanced to approach too closely the subject of the literary work of the host, if one may use the term in connection with a writer who so constantly disclaimed any approach to literature, and so persistently declined to take himself seriously.

In the front yard was a swing that appealed to me reminiscently with the force of the olden days when I had a swing of my very own.  As I “let the old cat die,” we talked of James Whitcomb Riley’s poem, “Waitin’ fer the Cat to Die,” and Mr. Harris told me of the visit Riley had made to him not long before.  Two men with such cheerful views of life could not but be congenial, and it was apparent that the visit had brought joy to them both.