"And at that here leaps up that ole black Cely in me (that ole sw'arin', cussin' Cely) and says, 'Yaas, Lord! save him at the last, but shake him over hell fur a while, and swinge him jes' a little bit!'... Then I know I got to git down on my knees and go at it ag'in! Yaas 'm, that's the way we has to fight!" A few days after this Margaret was sitting at the window in Philip's room late in the afternoon. The quarantine had been raised and Richard had gone to town that day for the first time. Somehow it had been a trying day. Philip had been restless without him. She had been telling him a story, but it had not been a very satisfactory one--Philip had had to make frequent suggestions and amendments, for she was absent-minded and not in her best story-telling vein. Her eyes wandered down the long avenue of elms that had given the place its name. What monarchs they were! Well might they be called the kings of the tree-world. They led clear down to the gate--the big gate that Philip had been so proud to open for his uncle. How jealous she had been over that,--and how foolishly. One could hardly see the gate from this window. She leaned further out. Yes, there was the gate, and-- "Mama," said Philip, "are you looking for Unker Wichard?" "No!" she said with a sharpness most unusual. "I am looking at the elms." "Ain't it most time for Unker Wichard to come?" asked Philip, querulously. He at least had missed him. His mother did not answer, except to say as Mammy Cely came in with some newly hatched chickens to show him, "I'll run down and get you some lilacs, dearie." In the garden, laid out after the fashion of a half century ago, were the lilac trees, white and purple, now in their glory. The garden, kept immaculate by Uncle Tobe's unremitting care, was as Richard De Jarnette's mother had left it, with beds of old-fashioned flowers edged with box. At the further end of it was an arbor covered not with grapes, but with a luxuriance of wistaria, the long clusters of which hung down through the trellised roof. The old wistaria, too, was a tree, gnarled and twisted. It had broken down several arbors, Mammy Cely said, but Richard would not have it destroyed.