Every summer that he could remember, he had spent with these adored grandparents. Edward Barbour and his young wife had come to Jackson two decades after the first Judson. At first their home had been only a large bedroom and dining-room. Then a porch had been added, and two more rooms to the south, where the orchard began now. The first pantry had been the piano box, connected by a shed to the kitchen and back porch. The north wing had followed, and the upstairs,--until now the sectional house fitted so well into the trees and vines, that it seemed to have sprouted and grown as easily and naturally as they. His cousins, Alfred, his own age, and Lil, a year younger, came up every day while he stayed here; Uncle Jimmy's house was visible beyond the last pear tree, down nearer the Greenville Road. There were strawberries in the garden, big luscious fruit soppy with the dew and gleaming like scarlet Easter eggs in the damp leaves. He learned to help old Dick harness up the buggy, or watched 'Liza spurt the warm creamy milk pattering into the wide-mouthed pails. After breakfast, Grandma let him trowel in the pansy or salvia beds,--her flowers were the talk of the neighbors,--and she gave him a little bed of his own, where portulacca, larkspur, sticky petunias, star-flowered cypress vines, and rose-geranium and heliotrope slips formed a crowded kaleidoscope of shape and color. There were other occupations for restless mind and fingers. His father might have laughed at his sewing, and openly despised him for it. But Grandmother took time from her embroidery to teach him the briar-stitch and cat-stitch, and the quick decoration of the chain. His mother kissed the grimed, badly embroidered pansy and wild-rose squares that were folded into his occasional happy notes. On rainy days the children played indoors. Spools,--was there ever such a house for spools! Grandmother had been saving them since the war. Endless cigar boxes rattled with spools of all sizes, big red linen thread ones, handy middle-sized ones, baby silk-twist bobbins. These were emptied upon the sitting-room floor: houses, trains, forts, whole cities flourished in the narrow boundaries of the rag carpet. Grandfather kept crayons, scissors, and a store of old Scribners' and Harpers', which were his without pleading. And parchesi boards, and backgammon--the place was a paradise to the boy. He delighted in long rambles with his grandfather. The old gentleman, after the war, had combined managing his small farm with running the main village store in Jackson. He had long given up the latter; his simple, honest Christian methods of dealing with his neighbors had been supplanted by more up-to-date ethics, although the store's old name was preserved.