Dark clouds gloomed the west as I passed the Stowe place. It seemed inexpressibly gloomy and lonesome under the great arching oaks where the wild tangle of grape and jasmine, greenbrier, and I know not what other vines and shrubs cloaks the crumbling foundations and makes a thorny and impenetrable jungle of the walks the gracious lady’s feet once trod, and crowds and smothers the plants and shrubs she once tended. The sheltering oaks seemed to brood a silence of sorrow, failure, and forgetfulness. Of the chapel, the school, and the work she nobly tried to do among the poor and ignorant, what traces here remained? And then the sun shone low under the western clouds and sent red beams in beneath the brooding live-oak limbs and touched all the swaying moss with fire, lighting up the cathedral arches with a golden warmth and radiance that glorified the place and all thoughts connected with it. Over on the darkening lane a negro boy, born free, whistled on his way home, a little cadenced fragment of a tune without beginning or end--a whistle like that of the cardinal that had flown, a crimson flame, into the morning air. I knew then that whatever crumbles, the spirit of cheer and devotion and self-sacrifice lives on unquenched. The jungle may ride over and obliterate the Stowe place and the lovely English gardens, but the spirit of devotion that burned in the one and of homemaking hospitality that glowed in the other can never be quenched. CHAPTER VII A FROSTY MORNING IN FLORIDA It was out of a moonless night that the frost came--a night whose sky was velvety black and seemed to hold no stars. Instead they had slipped moorings and on slender cables, I do not know how many thousand million miles long, were swung down toward the earth, quivering with friendly yellow fires as if to warm as well as light it. In a Northern December night the stars are diamond dust, splintered in keen glints from a matrix of black onyx. Their shine is that of scintillant spears of electricity. Here they are radiant golden globes swung just above the treetops. The wind out of the north was hushed and in the stillness the frost sprites that had soared gleefully upon it far beyond their usual habitat fell to earth, motionless. They were very young and adventurous frost sprites, and the sudden dawn found only their feathery white garments resting on exposed surfaces; the sprites themselves had already evaporated into invisible mists in terror of the coming fervid sun.