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."

One day when the children had grown to man's and woman's estate the
mother called them all together and said to them, "I want to tell you
the story of your father and of this island," and she told them the
simple story that is written here.

"And now," she said, "as you go out into the world I want each of you
to take with you the spirit of your father's work, and each, in your
own way and place, to do as he has done: make you the world a bit more
beautiful and better because you have been in it. That is your
mother's message to you."

The first son to leave the island home went with a band of hardy men to
South Africa, where they settled and became known as "the Boers."
Tirelessly they worked at the colony until towns and cities sprang up
and a new nation came into being: The Transvaal Republic. The son
became secretary of state of the new country, and to-day the United
States of South Africa bears tribute, in part, to the mother's message