Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man

LEB

and she was such a pretty girl and he was such a charming man that they fell in love with each other and got married. Afterward his family procured him a very influential post at court, and of course poor Cousin Eliza had to stay there wit

nd raised in Appleboro, South Carolina, and yet sacrificed herself by dragging out thirty years of exile in the court circles of Vienna! Any trueborn App

ed most?" I was curious to discover from an es

er De Rancé, I certainly needed him to take the bad taste out of my mouth an' the red out of my eye after viewin' Bill Sherman on a brass hawse in New York, with an a

t in Europe

s right there before me! What do folks want to rush off to foreign parts for, where they can't talk plain English an' a man can't get a satisfyin' meal of home cookin', when we've got the greatest work of art an' the best hams ever cured, right in Virginia? See America first, I s

's plenty good enough for Yankees, but Appleboro for me. Why, fat

ted coat is buckled tightly about his waist to form a neat bustle effect in the back, and the solidity of his granite shoes and the fell rigidity of his granite breeches are such as make the esthetic shudder; one has to admit that as a work of art he is almo

at is inherent in the living spirit of all South Carolina; w

liam Tecumseh Sherman as they would their own front fences. Occasionally somebody will give a backyard henhouse a needed coat or two; but a front fence? Never! It isn't the thing. Nobody does it. All normal South Carolinians come into the world wit

ver trade, and two railroads tap our rich territory to fetch and carry what we take and give. And, except in the poor parish of which I, Armand De Rancé, am pastor, and some few wealthy families like the Eustises, Agur's w

. It is a town where families live in houses that have sheltered generations of the same name, using furniture that was not new when Marion's men hid in the swamps and the redcoats overran the country-side. Almost everybo

e 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 p

can be poor pleasantly-a much rarer and far finer art than being old gracefully. Because of th

ing long ago, when I was not a poor parish priest, no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De Rancé, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was o

should remain me, myself, young Armand De Rancé, loving and above all beloved of that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Yo

home, an old house set in its walled inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me, calling me by my name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It was her mother. And while I stood staring at her changed face she took me by the han

t among the living, dragging about with me the corpse of what had been myself. Crushed by this horrible burden which none saw but I, I was blind to the beauties of earth and deaf to the mercies of heaven, until a great Voice call

not weak? who is off

ion was irrevocable, I did not fi

rted, "my career is decided. I hav

f a man in the flower of his youth. His hair, beautiful as the hair of Absalom, falls about his haughty, high-bred face, and so magnificently is he clothed that when I was a child I used to associate him in my mind with those "captains and rulers, clothed mo

abit of an order has replaced scarlet and gold; and sackcloth, satin. Between the two pictures hangs an old crucifix. For that is Armand De Rancé, glorious sin

he similarity to his of the fate which had come upon me who bore his name, which caused her to turn so pale. I also am an Armand De Rancé, o

heart. Turning, she r

g enough for solitude and silence. Surely there is room and work for one wh

my son wear my father's name and face and thus bring back the lost husband she had so greatly loved; she had prayed to see my children about her knees, and it must

e Rancé, and twenty four, and the day was to have been my wedding-day

r preacher. Though I myself cannot see that I ever did much actual good, since my

Call that may not be slighted, and bade me leave my sheltered place,

nd had me transferred from fashionable St. Jean Baptiste's to the poverty-stricken missionary parish of sodden lab

could have gone so far! You might even have worn the red hat. It is not hoping too much that the last De Rancé, the name

ctfully, that

ou do not kill yourself with overwork, you may return to me cured, when you see the futility

fine morning, and as he had been my guardian and was still the executor of my father's estate, the whole De Rancé fortune went down with him. All of it. Even the old house went, the old house which had sheltered so many of the name these two hundred years. If I could have grieved for an

d anew, in a strange place where nothing was familiar, and where I who had begun so differently was destined to grow into what I have sinc

and rosy, with a profusion of blonde cendre curls just beginning to whiten, a sweet and arch face, and eyes of clearest hazel, valanced with jet. She had been perhaps the loveliest and most beloved woman of that proud and select cir

f God painted in a family picture, with a scroll issuing fr

he world had a better r

udices, and she of all women could appreciate a pride that was almost equal to her own. When they initiated her into the inevitable and inescapable Carolina game of Matching Grandfathers, she always had a Roland for their Oliver; and as they gen

ver free from the smell of bad cooking, sinister with pawnshops, miserable with depressingly ugly rows of small houses where the hands herded, and all of it darkened by the grim shadow of the grea

y and thrift in the sterile soil of poor folks' minds, she could always plant seeds of color and beauty and fragrance in her garden and be surer of the result. That garden was my delight, too. I am sure no other equal space ever harbored so many birds and bees and butterflies; and its scented dusks was the paradise of moths. Great wonderful fellows clothed in kings' raiment, little chaps colored like flowers and seashells and rainbows, there the airy cohorts of the People of the Sky wheeled and danced

ss Sally Ruth's roosters and ours can wholeheartedly pick each other's eyes out through the other all the year round. These are fowls with so firm a faith in the Mosaic code of an eye for an eye that when Miss Sally Ruth has six blind of the right eye we have five blind

estants, and that Miss Sally Ruth's hens are all Presbyterians at heart, in spite of the fact that her roosters are Mormons. The Major likewise insists that you couldn't possibly hope to know the real Judge Hammond Mayne unless you knew his pet cats. You admir

ive, we have del

her at a loss where to begin, or what one thing to accomplish among so many things crying aloud. But finally, tackling what seemed to us the worst of these crying evils, we were able to turn the two empty rooms upstairs into what Madame pleasantly called Guest Rooms, thus remedying, to the best of our ability, the absolute lack of any accommodation for the sick and injured poor. And as time passed, these Guest Rooms, so greatly needed, proved not how much but how little we could

enormous man, big and ruddy and baldheaded and clean-shaven, with the shoulders of a coal-heaver and legs like a pair of twin oaks. He is rather absent-

wn as a big one, and folks need you more. He is a socialist who looks upon rich people as being merely poor people wi

ll a condition of liver. I do not always agree with him; but along with everybody else in Appleboro, I love him. Of all the many goodnesses that God has shown me, I do not count it l

to impinge upon the lives of many who were to be dearer to me than all that had gone before; I was not idly sent to know and