s. In such a place men and women grow
old serenely and delightfully, and youth flourishes all the fairer for
the rich soil which has brought it forth.

One has twenty-four hours to the day in a South Carolina town--plenty
of time to live in, so that one can afford to do things unhurriedly
and has leisure to be neighborly. For you do have neighbors here. It
is true that they know all your business and who and what your
grandfather was and wasn't, and they are prone to discuss it with a
frankness to make the scalp prickle. But then, you know theirs, too,
and you are at liberty to employ the same fearsome frankness, provided
you do it politely and are not speaking to an outsider. It is
perfectly permissible for _you_ to say exactly what you please about
your own people to your own people, but should an outsider and an
alien presume to do likewise, the Carolina code admits of but one
course of conduct; borrowing the tactics of the goats against the
wolf, they close in shoulder to shoulder and present to the audacious
intruder an unbroken and formidable front of horns.

And it is the last place left in all America where decent poverty is
in nowise penalized. You can be poor pleasantly--a much rarer and far
finer art than being old gracefully. Because of this, life in South
Carolina sometimes retains a simplicity as fine and sincere as it is
charming.

I deplore the necessity, but I will be pardoned if I pause here to
become somewhat personal, to explain who and what I am and how I came
to be a pastor in Appleboro. To explain myself, then, I shall have to
go back to a spring morning long ago, when I was not a poor parish
priest, no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De
Rance, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning
sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was of a perishable
beauty, dazzled because life gave me so much, proud of an old and
honored name, secure in ancestral wealth, loving laughter so much that
I looked with the raised eyebrow and the twisted lip at austerities
and prayers.

If ever I reflected at all, it was to consider that I had nothing to
pray for, save that things might ever remain as they were: that I
should remain me, myself, young Armand De Rance, loving and above all
beloved of that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Young,
wealthy, strong, beautiful, loving, and beloved! To hold all that,
crowded into the hollow of one boyish hand! Oh, it