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.
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