Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/124

 "Miranda must have that," was his instant decision; "she will find that I can manage to bring home the gold snuffbox and something more besides."

His determined effort to buy the tree, however, had a strange effect. At the first the old shopkeeper merely met all his offers with a determined shake of the head, but, as Humphrey insisted, he became more and more excited and at last, wringing his hands, burst into a torrent of jabbering explanation. Captain Reynolds had cruised along these shores long enough to have learned a little of the mixed dialect of French, Spanish and Moorish words by which foreigners and natives contrived to understand one another, so that he was able to gather from the Chinaman's flood of talk that the pine tree was the most precious of his possessions, that he had carried it himself all the way from Pekin, that it was a hundred years old and that he felt certain the spirits of his ancestors loved to cluster about its twisted little branches. What had caused his banishment from his own land Humphrey could not make out, but he did gain some inkling of how the withered old man felt as he looked back upon some frail, small hut on the shore of one of China's muddy yellow rivers, upon some bit of land that he and his ancestors had tilled patiently for unnumbered generations, upon a tiny garden where the tree had grown. No, it was quite plain that he would not sell it!