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 cool wooded roads what once had been only barren sun-baked 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; today 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."