he money
to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred
times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans,
colored or white, could be made, had I not seen it with my own eyes. Its
success lies not in material possessions or prosperity, not in the food
and shelter it provides to those who so pitifully needed it, but in the
fact that it is in the truest and finest sense a _home_, a place endowed
with the greatest blessings any home can have: contentment and
affection. What Miss Chadwick has provided is, in short, an institution
with a heart.

How did she do it? That, like the other mystery of how she manages to
house those seventy small lively people in that little building, is
something which only Heaven and Miss Chadwick understand.

But then, if you have ever visited the home and met Miss Chadwick, and
seen her with her children, you know that Heaven and Miss Chadwick
understand a lot of things the rest of us don't know about at all!

CHAPTER XXXVI

A BIT OF RURAL GEORGIA

To walk with the morning and watch its rose unfold;
To drowse with the noontide lulled in its heart of gold;
To lie with the night-time and dream the dreams of old.

--MADISON CAWEIN.

A man I know studies as a hobby something which he calls "graphics"--the
term denoting the reaction of the mind to certain words. One of the
words he used in an experiment with me was "winter." When he said
"winter" there instantly came to me the picture of a snowstorm in
Quebec. I saw the front of the Hotel Frontenac at dusk through a mist of
driving snow. There were lights in the windows. A heavy wind was blowing
and as I leaned against it the front of my overcoat was plastered with
sticky white flakes. The streets and sidewalks were deep with snow, and
the only person besides myself in the vision was a sentry standing with
his gun in the lee of the vestibule outside the local militia
headquarters.

If my friend were to come now and try me with the word "spring," I know
what picture it would call to mind. I should see the Burge plantation,
near Covington, Georgia: the simple old white house with its rose-clad
porch, or "gallery," its grove of tall trees, its carriage-house, its
well-house, and other minor dependencies clustering nearby like
chickens about a white hen, its background the rolling cottonfields,
their red soil glowing salmon-colored in the sun. For, as I was never so
conscious of t