ums jest match the red and yeller leaves on the
trees, and the colors you see in the sky after the first frosts when
the cold weather begins to set in. Yes, honey, there's a time and a
season for everything; flowers, too, jest as Solomon said."

An old garden is like an old life. Who plants from youth to age writes
a record of the years in leaf and blossom, and the spot becomes as
sacred as old wine, old books, and old friends. Here in the garden of
Aunt Jane's planting I found that flowers were also memories; that
reminiscences were folded in the petals of roses and lilies; that a
rose's perfume might be a voice from a vanished summer; and even the
snake gliding across our path might prove a messenger bearing a story
of other days. Aunt Jane made a pass at it with her hoe, and laughed
as the little creature disappeared on the other side of the fence.

"I never see a striped snake," she said, "that I don't think o' Sam
Amos and the time he saw snakes. It wasn't often we got a joke on Sam,
but his t'u'nament and his snake kept us laughin' for many a day.

"Sam was one o' them big, blunderin' men, always givin' Milly trouble,
and havin' trouble himself, jest through pure keerlessness. He meant
well; and Milly used to say that if what Sam did was even half as good
as what Sam intended to do, there'd be one perfect man on God's
earth. One of his keerless ways was scatterin' his clothes all over
the house. Milly'd scold and fuss about it, but Sam got worse instead
o' better up to the day he saw the snake, and after that Milly said
there wasn't a more orderly man in the state. The way of it was this:
Sam was raisin' an embankment 'round one of his ponds, and Uncle Jim
Matthews and Amos Crawford was helpin' him. It was one Monday mornin',
about the first of April, and the weather was warm and sunny, jest the
kind to bring out snakes. I reckon there never was anybody hated a
snake as much as Sam did. He'd been skeered by one when he was a
child, and never got over it. He used to say there was jest two things
he was afraid of: Milly and a snake. That mornin' Uncle Jim and Amos
got to the pond before Sam did, and Uncle Jim hollered out, 'Well,
Sam, we beat you this time.' Uncle Jim never got tired tellin' what
happened next. He said Sam run up the embankment with his spade, and
set it in the ground and put his foot on it to push it down. The next
minute he give a yell that you could 'a' heard half a mile, slung the
spade over i