Miss Chadwick is an Englishwoman.  Coming out to America a good many years ago, she somehow found Atlanta, and in Atlanta somehow found this orphanage, which was then both figuratively and literally dropping to pieces.  Some one had to take hold of it, so Miss Chadwick did.  How successful she has been it is hard to convey in words.  I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements.  Far from it.  The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from.  Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could be made, had I not seen it with my own eyes.  Its success lies not in material possessions or prosperity, not in the food and shelter it provides to those who so pitifully needed it, but in the fact that it is in the truest and finest sense a home, a place endowed with the greatest blessings any home can have:  contentment and affection.  What Miss Chadwick has provided is, in short, an institution with a heart.

How did she do it?  That, like the other mystery of how she manages to house those seventy small lively people in that little building, is something which only Heaven and Miss Chadwick understand.

But then, if you have ever visited the home and met Miss Chadwick, and seen her with her children, you know that Heaven and Miss Chadwick understand a lot of things the rest of us don’t know about at all!

CHAPTER XXXVI

A BIT OF RURAL GEORGIA

    To walk with the morning and watch its rose unfold;
    To drowse with the noontide lulled in its heart of gold;
    To lie with the night-time and dream the dreams of old.

    —­MADISON CAWEIN.

A man I know studies as a hobby something which he calls “graphics”—­the term denoting the reaction of the mind to certain words.  One of the words he used in an experiment with me was “winter.”  When he said “winter” there instantly came to me the picture of a snowstorm in Quebec.  I saw the front of the Hotel Frontenac at dusk through a mist of driving snow.  There were lights in the windows.  A heavy wind was blowing and as I leaned against it the front of my overcoat was plastered with sticky white flakes.  The streets and sidewalks were deep with snow, and the only person besides myself in the vision was a sentry standing with his gun in the lee of the vestibule outside the local militia headquarters.

If my friend were to come now and try me with the word “spring,” I know what picture it would call to mind.  I should see the Burge plantation, near Covington, Georgia:  the simple old white house with its rose-clad porch, or “gallery,” its grove of tall trees, its carriage-house, its well-house, and other minor dependencies clustering nearby like chickens about a white hen, its background the rolling cottonfields, their red soil glowing salmon-colored in the sun.  For, as I was never so conscious of the brutality of winter as in that evening snowstorm at Quebec, I was never so conscious, as at the time of our visit to the Burge plantation, of the superlative soft sweetness of the spring.