"You scratch yourself." "How can I scratch myself, Sam, when I'm not doing anything?" "Caterpillars crawl on you." "They crawl on me when I'm not in the garden, Sam. So why do you harp on THAT?" Slowly they walked on--past the temptations of Eden. "Please, let me try just once, Sam!" "Try what, Miss Gabriella?" "To see whether the snakes will bite me." "I couldn't!" "Then take me to see the grapes," she would say wearily. There they were, hanging under the glass: bunches of black and of purple Hamburgs, and of translucent Malagas, big enough to have been an armful! "Just one, Sam, please." "Make you sick." "They never make me sick when I eat them in the house. They are good for me! One COULDN'T make me sick. I'm sick because you DON'T give it to me. Don't I LOOK sick, Sam?" The time came when Gabriella began to extend her knowledge to the country, as she drove out beside her grandmother in the balmy spring and early summer afternoons. "What is that, grandmother?" she would say, pointing with her small forefinger to a field by the turnpike. "That is corn." "And what is that?" "That is wheat." "And what is that?" "Oats, Gabriella." "Oh, grandmother, what is THAT?" "Tut, tut, child! Don't you know what that is? That's hemp. That is what bales all our cotton." "Oh, grandmother, smell it!" After this sometimes Gabriella would order the driver to turn off into some green lane about sunset and press on till they found a field by the way. As soon as they began to pass it, over into their faces would be wafted the clean, cooling, velvet-soft, balsam breath of the hemp. The carriage would stop, and Gabriella, standing up and facing the field, would fill her lungs again and again, smiling at her grandmother for approval. Then she would take her seat and say quietly:-- "Turn round, Tom, and drive back. I have smelt it enough." These drives alone with her grandmother were for spring and early summer only. Full summer brought up from their plantations in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, her uncles and the wives and children of some of them. All the bedrooms in the big house were filled, and Gabriella was nearly lost in the multitude, she being the only child of the only daughter of her grandmother. And now what happy times there were. The silks, and satins, and laces! The plate, the gold, the cut glass! The dinners, the music, the laughter, the wines! Later, some of her uncles' families might travel on with their servants to watering places farther north. But in September all were back again under the one broad Kentucky roof, stopping for the beautiful Lexington fair, then celebrated all over the land; and for the races--those days of the thoroughbred only; and until frost fall should make it safe to return to the swamps and bayous, loved by the yellow fever.