"At this I couldn't keep still no longer. We was at the table then, and I looked over to Alex between the candlesticks and felt as if he was back in knickerbockers again, telling me God had made enough ponies so he could gallop his all day on the Plank Road if he wanted to.
"'You and Silas Sykes, Alex,' I says, 'have come to the same motto. Silas says Nature is real handy about taking her course so be you don't yank open cocoons and buds and like that.'
"'Old Silas,' says Alex. 'Lord, is he still going on about everything? Old Silas....'
"'Yes,' I says, 'he is. And so am I. Out by my woodshed I've got a Greening apple tree. When it was about a year old a cow I used to keep browst it down. It laid over on the ground, broke clean off all but one little side of bark that kept right on doing business with sap, like it didn't know its universe was sat on. I didn't get time for a week or two to grub it up, and when I did go to it, I see it was still living, through that little pinch of bark. I liked the pluck, and I straightened it up and tied it to the shed. I used to fuss with it some. Once in a storm I went out and propped a dry-goods box over it. I kept the earth rich and drove the bugs off. I kind of got interested in seeing what it would do next. What it done was to grow like all possessed. It was twenty years ago and more that the cow come by it, and this year I've had seven bushels of Greenings off that one tree. Suppose I hadn't tied it up?'
"'You'd have saved yourself no end of trouble, dear Calliope,' says Alex, 'to say nothing of sparing the feelings of the cow.'
"'I ain't so anxious any more,' says I, 'about sparing folks' feelings as I am about sparing folks. Nor I ain't so crazy as I used to be about saving myself trouble, either.'
"'Dear Calliope,' says Alex, 'what an advocate you are. Won't you be my advocate?'
"He wouldn't argue serious with me now no more than he would when he was in knickerbockers. But yet he was adorable. When we got back to the library, I went on finishing up the books and I could hear him being adorable. He dipped down into the past and brought up rich things—off down old ways of life in the village that he'd had a part in and then off on the new ways where his life had led him. Java—had Insley ever been in Java? He must show him the moonstone he got there and tell him the story they told him about it. But the queerest moonstone story was one he'd got in Lucknow—so he goes on, and sends Bayless for a cabinet, and from one precious stone and another he just naturally drew out romances and adventures, as if he was ravelling the stones out into them. And then he begun taking down some of his old books. And when it come to books, the appeal to Insley was like an appeal of friends, and he burrowed into them musty parchments abundant.
"'By George,' Insley says once, 'I didn't dream there were such things in Friendship Village.'