During the summer of my sixth birthday, my grandfather gave me his steeple clock. I think I know why he did, or at least I can guess at the reason: he died that fall, and perhaps he was beginning to think with some nervous anticipation of that certain inevitability. But if he had asked me what I wanted, I probably would have asked for the stereoptican viewer and the set of double-picture postcards. I was particularly taken with the view of Niagara Falls; when I held the small shell that was on the parlor table (not the large conch one that was a doorstop) to my ear, the sight and the sound was about as close as a young South Carolina inlander could come to those waters that, with a child's imagination, roared down in sepia torrents. But he didn't ask, and now I am grateful for that.

He lived about 40 miles from us in a small town that had two principal streets, neither of them very long. Where they crossed, of course, was "the Square." A few stores, the post office in one of them that my grandfather owned, a horse fountain, and a bench or two—not much more except for the Baptist and Presbyterian churches and, of course, the railroad depot. Nearly everybody who lived in town had a farm that began nearly at the back door; in that sandy soil cotton, although plagued incessently by the ever-present boll weevil, grew moderately well. Before the cotton fields began, there was the kitchen garden—beans, tomatoes, corn, watermelons, and the like. But the most beautiful of the growing things for me were the tremendous gardenia and hydrangea bushes; when they were in bloom we called them the snowball trees. In the summer, particularly after an