The Americanization of Edward Bok | Page 6

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 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."
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 to
"make the world a bit more beautiful and better."
The second son left home for the Dutch mainland, where he took
charge of a small parish; and when he had finished his work he was
mourned by king and peasant as one of the leading clergymen of his
time and people.
A third son, scorning his own safety, plunged into the boiling surf on
one of those nights of terror so common to that coast, rescued a
half-dead sailor, carried him to his father's house, and brought him back
to a life of usefulness that gave the world a record of imperishable
value. For the half-drowned sailor was Heinrich Schliemann, the
famous explorer of the dead cities of Troy.
The first daughter now left the island nest; to her inspiration her
husband owed, at his life's close, a shelf of works in philosophy which
to-day are among the standard books of their class.
The second daughter worked beside her husband until she brought him
to be regarded as one of the ablest preachers of his land, speaking for
more than forty years the message of man's betterment.
To another son it was given to sit wisely in the councils of his land;
another followed the footsteps of his father. Another daughter, refusing
marriage for duty, ministered unto and made a home for one whose
eyes could see not.
So they went out into the world, the girls and boys of that island home,
each carrying the story of their father's simple but beautiful work and
the remembrance of their mother's message. Not one from that home
but did well his or her work in the world; some greater, some smaller,
but each left behind the traces of