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