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Page 5
The young man now decided to settle on the island, and began to look
around for a home. It was a grim place, barren of tree or living green
of any kind; it was as if a man had been exiled to Siberia. Still,
argued the young mayor, an ugly place is ugly only because it is not
beautiful. And beautiful he determined this island should be.
One day the young mayor-judge called together his council. "We must
have trees," he said; "we can make this island a spot of beauty if we
will!" But the practical seafaring men demurred; the little money they
had was needed for matters far more urgent than trees.
"Very well," was the mayor's decision--and little they guessed what the
words were destined to mean--"I will do it myself." And that year he
planted one hundred trees, the first the island had ever seen.
"Too cold," said the islanders; "the severe north winds and storms will
kill them all."
"Then I will plant more," said the unperturbed mayor. And for the
fifty years that he lived on the island he did so. He planted trees
each year; and, moreover, he had deeded to the island government land
which he turned into public squares and parks, and where each spring he
set out shrubs and plants.
Moistened by the salt mist the trees did not wither, but grew
prodigiously. In all that expanse of turbulent sea--and only those who
have seen the North Sea in a storm know how turbulent it can be--there
had not been a foot of ground on which the birds, storm-driven across
the water-waste, could rest in their flight. Hundreds of dead birds
often covered the surface of the sea. Then one day the trees had grown
tall enough to look over the sea, and, spent and driven, the first
birds came and rested in their leafy shelter. And others came and
found protection, and gave their gratitude vent in song. Within a few
years so many birds had discovered the trees in this new island home
that they attracted the attention not only of the native islanders but
also of the people on the shore five miles distant, and the island
became famous as the home of the rarest and most beautiful birds. So
grateful were the birds for their resting-place that they chose one end
of the island as a special spot for the laying of their eggs and the
raising of their young, and they fairly peopled it. It was not long
before ornithologists from various parts of the world came to
"Egg-land," as the farthermost point of the island came to be known, to
see the marvellous sight, not of thousands but of hundreds of thousands
of bird-eggs.
A pair of storm-driven nightingales had now found the island and mated
there; their wonderful notes thrilled even the souls of the natives;
and as dusk fell upon the seabound strip of land the women and children
would come to "the square" and listen to the evening notes of the birds
of golden song. The two nightingales soon grew into a colony, and
within a few years so rich was the island in its nightingales that over
to the Dutch coast and throughout the land and into other countries
spread the fame of "The Island of Nightingales."
Meantime, the young mayor-judge, grown to manhood, had kept on planting
trees each year, setting out his shrubbery and plants, until their
verdure now beautifully shaded the quaint, narrow lanes, and
transformed into wooded roads what once had been only barren wastes.
Artists began to hear of the place and brought their canvases, and on
the walls of hundreds of homes throughout the world hang to-day bits of
the beautiful lanes and wooded spots of "The Island of Nightingales."
The American artist, William M. Chase, took his pupils there almost
annually. "In all the world to-day," he declared to his students, as
they exclaimed at the natural cool restfulness of the island, "there is
no more beautiful place."
The trees are now majestic in their height of forty or more feet, for
it is nearly a hundred years since the young attorney went to the
island and planted the first tree; to-day the churchyard where he lies
is a bower of cool green, with the trees that he planted dropping their
moisture on the lichen-covered stone on his grave.
This much did one man do. But he did more.
After he had been on the barren island two years he went to the
mainland one day, and brought back with him a bride. It was a bleak
place for a bridal home, but the young wife had the qualities of the
husband. "While you raise your trees," she said, "I will raise our
children." And within a score of years the young bride sent thirteen
happy-faced, well-brought-up children over that island, and there was
reared a home such as is given to few. Said a man who subsequently
married a daughter of that home: "It was such a home that once you had
been in it you felt you must be of it, and that if you couldn't marry
one of the daughters you would have been glad to have married the cook."
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