with him. All of it. Even the old house went, the old house which had sheltered so many of the name these two hundred years. If I could have grieved for anything it would have been that. Nothing was left except the modest private fortune long since secured to my mother by my father's affection. It had been a bridal gift, intended to cover her personal expenses, her charities, and her pretty whims. Now it was to stand between her and want.

Stripped all but bare, and with one servant left of all our staff, we turned our backs upon our old life, our old home, and faced the world anew, in a strange place where nothing was familiar, and where I who had begun so differently was destined to grow into what I have since become—just an old priest, with but small reputation outside of his few friends and poor working-folks. There! That is quite enough of me!

There was one pleasant feature of our new home that rejoiced me for my mother's sake. From the very first she found neighbors who were friendly and charming. Now my mother, when we came to Appleboro, was still a beautiful woman, fair and rosy, with a profusion of blonde cendre curls just beginning to whiten, a sweet and arch face, and eyes of clearest hazel, valanced with jet. She had been perhaps the loveliest and most beloved woman of that proud and select circle which is composed of families descended from the old noblesse, the most exclusive circle of New Orleans society. And, as she said, nothing could change nor alter the fact that no matter what happened to us, we were still De Rancés!

"Ah! And was it, then, a De Rancé who had the holy Mother of God painted in a family picture, with a scroll issuing from her lips addressing him as 'My Cousin'?" I asked, slyly.

"If it was, nobody in the world had a better right!" said she stoutly.

Thus the serene and unquestioning faith of their estimate of themselves in the scheme of things, as evidenced by these Carolina folk around her, caused Madame De Rancé neither surprise nor amusement. She understood. She shared many of their prejudices, and she of all women could appreciate a pride that was almost equal to her own. When they initiated her into the inevitable and inescapable Carolina game of Matching Grandfathers, she always had a Roland for their Oliver; and as they generally came back with an Oliver to match her Roland, all the players retired with equal honors and mutual respect. Every door in Appleboro at once opened wide to Madame De Rancé. The difference in religion was obviated by the similarity of Family.

Fortunately, too, the Church and Parish House were not in the mill district itself, a place shoved aside, full of sordid hideousness, ribboned with railroad tracks, squalid with boarding-houses never free from the smell of bad cooking, sinister with pawnshops, miserable with depressingly ugly rows of small houses where the hands herded, and all of it darkened by the grim shadow of the great red brick mills themselves. Instead, our Church sits on a tree-shaded corner in the old town, and the roomy white-piazza'd Parish House is next door, embowered in the pleasantest of all gardens.

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 Clélie 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!"

As one may perceive, we have delicious neighbors!

When we had been settled in Appleboro a little more than a year, and I had gotten the parish wheels running fairly smooth, we discovered that by my mother's French house-keeping, that exquisitely careful house-keeping which uses everything and wastes nothing, my salary was going to be quite sufficient to cover our modest ménage, thus leaving my mother's own income practically intact. We could use it in the parish; but there was so much to be done for that parish that we were rather at a loss where to begin, or what one thing to accomplish among so many things crying aloud. But finally, tackling what seemed to us the worst of these crying evils, we were able to turn the two empty rooms upstairs into what Madame pleasantly called Guest Rooms, thus remedying, to the best of our ability, the absolute lack of any accommodation for the sick and injured poor. And as time passed, these Guest Rooms, so greatly needed, proved not how much but how little we could do. We could only afford to maintain two beds on our small allowance, for they had to be absolutely free, to help those for whom they were intended—poor folks in immediate and dire need, for whom the town had no other place except an insanitary room in the jail. You could be born and baptized in the Guest Rooms, or shriven and sent thence in hope. More often you were coaxed back to health under my mother's nursing and Clélie's cooking and the skill of Doctor Walter Westmoreland.

No bill ever came to the Parish House from Dr. Walter Westmoreland, whom my poor people look upon as a direct act of Providence in their behalf. He is an enormous man, big and ruddy and baldheaded and clean-shaven, with the