"Your visitors remain strangers but a little while," Huntington answered him, "because of your hospitality."
"Won't you come in and sit down?" the old man urged.
"Not to-day, thank you; but if we should not be intruding it would be a pleasure to return some other time."
"You could not intrude, sir," he insisted; "for I am only waiting."
"Waiting?" Huntington questioned.
"Yes; waiting for that," and he pointed to a tall cedar growing inside the yard, beside which was the stump of another tree.
"He wants to tell us something," Merry whispered.
"They were planted there sixty years ago," the old man continued, "the two of them. They were little slips, stuck in our wedding-cake as is our custom here, when my wife and I were married. We put them in the ground, for everything takes root in this soil, and they grew side by side for fifty years. Then that one fell"—pointing to the stump,—"and the next day my wife was taken sick and died. We made her coffin from the cedar wood of that tree, sir. Now I'm waiting for the other one to fall. That was ten years ago now, so it won't be long."
"Isn't that a beautiful idea?" Merry exclaimed, touched by the unconscious pathos of the old man's words. "We would like to come back and have you tell us about your wife."
"She was a sweet, young girl like yourself when I married her," he replied. "We were both born here and never left the island. But the maps aren't fair to us; we're not so small"—he straightened and waved his arm—"we're not so small, as you can see."