V
When summer came, Pelham spent his vacation at Grandfather Barbour's home. He made the journey alone, in the conductor's care.
Joyfully he hopped out at the station, and drove up the leisurely oak avenue to the big house. He had his own cool little room again, fragrant with the honeysuckle blossoms beneath the window, and the scent of peach blossoms from the near end of the orchard.
Every summer that he could remember, he had spent with these adored grandparents. Edward Barbour and his young wife had come to Jackson two decades after the first Judson. At first their home had been only a large bedroom and dining-room. Then a porch had been added, and two more rooms to the south, where the orchard began now. The first pantry had been the piano box, connected by a shed to the kitchen and back porch. The north wing had followed, and the upstairs,—until now the sectional house fitted so well into the trees and vines, that it seemed to have sprouted and grown as easily and naturally as they.
His cousins, Alfred, his own age, and Lil, a year younger, came up every day while he stayed here; Uncle Jimmy's house was visible beyond the last pear tree, down nearer the Greenville Road.
There were strawberries in the garden, big luscious fruit soppy with the dew and gleaming like scarlet Easter eggs in the damp leaves.
He learned to help old Dick harness up the buggy, or watched 'Liza spurt the warm creamy milk pattering into the wide-mouthed pails.
After breakfast, Grandma let him trowel in the pansy or salvia beds,—her flowers were the talk of the neighbors,—and she gave him a little bed of his own, where portulacca, larkspur, sticky petunias, star-flowered cypress vines, and rose-geranium and heliotrope slips formed a crowded kaleidoscope of shape and color.
There were other occupations for restless mind and fingers. His father might have laughed at his sewing, and openly despised him for it. But Grandmother took time from her embroidery to teach him the briar-stitch and cat-stitch, and the quick decoration of the chain. His mother kissed the grimed, badly embroidered pansy and wild-rose squares that were folded into his occasional happy notes.