There is no use in trying to describe the Magnolia Gardens. The azaleas were in full bloom, and nowhere else in the world, I verily believe, is there such a sight. Some of the bushes are thirty feet high and look like giant bouquets.
"I feel like the country woman at the circus the first time she saw a hippopotamus," declared Zebedee; "I don't believe there's no sich thing! It doesn't seem possible that these are growing plants and that in Richmond at Easter I have had to pay five dollars for a little azalea not much more than two feet high."
The dark green of the magnolia and live-oak trees enhanced the glory of the flowers. It was so beautiful it hurt. Molly said it made her feel as she did the first time she ever saw an opera at the Metropolitan in New York. It was her freshman year at Wellington, and she had been invited to visit in New York during the Christmas holidays.
"It was 'Madame Butterfly,' and the scenery was so wonderful to me I could hardly listen to the music. I fancy cherry-blossom time in Japan must be almost as beautiful as this, but I can't believe it is quite so brilliant."
Magnolia Cemetery, which is just outside of Charleston and which Dee had refused to see without Zebedee, certainly would be a nice place to be buried in. It was sadder to visit because of the new graves there, and Zebedee had to abandon his usual cheerful graveyard spirits. He was quite solemn and kept his hat off all the time.
Louis skirted us around the outer edge of the cemetery first and saved the great old oak for the last. It burst upon us with such force that as a crowd we were left breathless. The beauty of the azaleas at Magnolia gardens, compared to this hoary old monarch, were as a cheap obituary poem to the twenty-third psalm. And in saying that I do not mean to belittle the beauty of the gardens, but I have to put them in that category to make a place high enough in the scale of comparison for that tree.
It was huge, but bent over with years like some old man, and one great limb was resting on the ground, giving it the look of one kneeling in prayer. The foliage was vigorous and glossy, deeper and richer in color than that of many younger trees, just as the wonderful words of some grand old man, John Burroughs or his ilk, will make the utterances of younger men seem pale and feeble.
In kneeling and coming so in touch with Mother Earth, this Father of the Forest had borrowed of her fullness, and now his trunk and huge limbs were covered with an exquisite ferny growth. Wild violets and anemones bloomed happily in the crotches of his great arms, and I saw a tiny wild strawberry ripening on his knee, having escaped the vigilance of the many birds nesting in the upper branches. Spanish moss hung in festoons from some of the limbs, seeming like a venerable beard.
I have never had anything affect me as that tree did. It was so gallant and brave, so kindly and beneficent! It had the spirit of youth and the kindliness of old age; the playfulness of a child and the wisdom of centuries. It must have seen the Indians crowded out by the white men; looked out across the harbor at the storming of Fort Moultrie, and almost a century later at the defence of Fort Sumter. Wars and rumors of wars were nothing to this veteran. While we were there a perky wren pounced down on the defenceless strawberry and gobbled it up, and I am sure the gray beard thought no more of the gobbling up of the redmen than he did of that red berry. His comparisons were of æons and not of decades or mere centuries.
"There is no use in talking about it!" exclaimed Zebedee. "I've got to climb that tree, if it means one hundred dollars' fine and a month in jail."