ne it, he slipped the bark back to its place, and
put the end of the stick in his mouth and began to blow; and out of
the holes that he had cut, and which he stopped, one after another,
with his fingers, came what grandfather said was the sweetest music he
had ever heard--music like the voice of a bird singing a long way off,
or like that of a tiny bell.

As the old man played, he seemed to forget all about my grandfather;
but by and by he laid down the whistle, and smiled and said, "Come.
Now we will make the tree." And together the old man and the boy
walked down to the brook, and crossed over on some stepping stones, to
a place where the ground was soft and black and wet; and there, while
the boy held the stick straight, the old man pushed it far down into
the mud until it stood firm and true, with the whistle at the upper
end of it. And the old man took off his hat, and bowing to the stick,
seemed to my grandfather to make a speech to it.

"Little brother," he said, "we leave you here, where you will never be
hungry or thirsty. You have made your little music for us to-day, but
when you have grown tall and strong, One Who is greater than I shall
play upon you with the breath of His mighty winds; and when this
little boy is older than I am now,"--and here he put his hand on my
grandfather's head,--"his children's children shall hear your music
and be glad."

In a little while after that, the old man put on his pack and went
away; but my grandfather could not forget him, and almost every day he
looked at the stick by the brook. The whistle at the top began to
wither and dry up, and the loose bark cracked open and fell away,
until it seemed as if the whole stick must be dead; but one day my
grandfather saw that a tiny bud had appeared below where the whistle
had been; and the bud became a little sprout, and the sprout a shoot,
and other shoots followed, until the stick was indeed a little tree.

Through all the years that came after, it grew taller and stronger,
until "The Tinker's Willow" was known as the greatest tree in all the
countryside, and the birds did, indeed, build their nests among its
branches, and the cattle lay in its shade in the hot noontide.

Even when my grandfather was an old, old man, and had grown-up sons
and daughters, and many grandchildren, he loved to sit on the bench by
the shop and listen to the voice of the wind among the leaves of the
great tree; and then, if we asked him, he would te