In Appleboro the pleasant and prejudiced Old looks askance at the
noisy and intruding New, before which, it is forced to retreat--always
without undue or undignified haste, however, and always unpainted and
unreconstructed. It is a town where families live in houses that have
sheltered generations of the same name, using furniture that was not
new when Marion's men hid in the swamps and the redcoats overran the
country-side. Almost everybody has a garden, full of old-fashioned
shrubs and flowers, and fine trees. In such a place men and women grow
old serenely and delightfully, and youth flourishes all the fairer for
the rich soil which has brought it forth.

One has twenty-four hours to the day in a South Carolina town--plenty
of time to live in, so that one can afford to do things unhurriedly
and has leisure to be neighborly. For you do have neighbors here. It
is true that they know all your business and who and what your
grandfather was and wasn't, and they are prone to discuss it with a
frankness to make the scalp prickle. But then, you know theirs, too,
and you are at liberty to employ the same fearsome frankness, provided
you do it politely and are not speaking to an outsider. It is
perfectly permissible for _you_ to say exactly what you please about
your own people to your own people, but should an outsider and an
alien presume to do likewise, the Carolina code admits of but one
course of conduct; borrowing the tactics of the goats against the
wolf, they close in shoulder to shoulder and present to the audacious
intruder an unbroken and formidable front of horns.

And it is the last place left in all America where decent poverty is
in nowise penalized. You can be poor pleasantly--a much rarer and far
finer art than being old gracefully. Because of this, life in South
Carolina sometimes retains a simplicity as fine and sincere as it is