d to go, and every now and then
she'd sob out, 'I wouldn't mind it so much if I could take my
gyarden.' When they began packin' up their things, grandmother took up
this rose and put it in an iron kittle and laid plenty of good rich
earth around the roots. Grandfather said the load they had to carry
was heavy enough without puttin' in any useless things. But
grandmother says, says she: 'If you leave this rose behind, you can
leave me, too.' So the kittle and the rose went. Four weeks they was
on their way, and every time they come to a creek or a river or a
spring, grandmother'd water her rose, and when they got to their
journey's end, before they'd ever chopped a tree or laid a stone or
broke ground, she cut the sod with an axe, and then she took
grandfather's huntin' knife and dug a hole and planted her rose.
Grandfather cut some limbs off a beech tree and drove 'em into the
ground all around it to keep it from bein' tramped down, and when that
was done, grandmother says: 'Now build the house so's this rose'll
stand on the right-hand side o' the front walk. Maybe I won't die of
homesickness if I can set on my front door-step and see one flower
from my old Virginia gyarden.'

"Well, grandmother didn't die of homesickness, nor the rose either.
The transplantin' was good for both of 'em. She lived to be ninety
years old, and when she died the house wouldn't hold the children and
grandchildren and great-grandchildren that come to the funeral. And
here's her rose growin' and bloomin' yet, like there wasn't any such
things in the world as old age and death. And every spring I gether a
basketful o' these pink roses and lay 'em on her grave over yonder in
the old buryin'-ground.

"Some folks has family china and family silver that they're mighty
proud of. Martha Crawford used to have a big blue and white bowl that
belonged to her great-grandmother, and she thought more o' that bowl
than she did of everything else in the house. Milly Amos had a set o'
spoons that'd been in her family for four generations and was too
precious to use; and I've got my family rose, and it's jest as dear to
me as china and silver are to other folks. I ricollect after father
died and the estate had to be divided up, and sister Mary and brother
Joe and the rest of 'em was layin' claim to the claw-footed mahogany
table and the old secretary and mother's cherry sideboard and such
things as that, and brother Joe turned around and says to me, says
he: