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.”