Finally, casting about in my mind for some new subject of conversation--for I was reluctant to leave him soon after so long an absence--it occurred to me that we had not said anything about his one walnut tree. Of all the other trees and the fruit he had gathered from them he had already spoken. "By-the-way," I said, "did your walnut tree yield well this year?" "Yes, very well," he returned; then he checked himself and said, "Pretty well, but I did not get much for them." And after a little hesitation he added, "That reminds me of something I had forgotten. Something I have been keeping for you--a little present." He began to feel in the capacious pockets of his big outside waistcoat, but found nothing. "I must give it up," he said; "I must have mislaid it." He seemed a little relieved, and at the same time a little disappointed; and by-and-by, on my remarking that he had not felt in all his pockets, began searching again, and in the end produced the lost something--a walnut! Holding it up a moment, he presented it to me with a little forward jerk of the hand and a little inclination of the head; and that little gesture, so unexpected in him, served to show that he had thought a good deal about giving the walnut away, and had looked on it as rather an important present. It was, perhaps, the only one he had ever made in his life. While giving it to me he said very nicely, "Pray make use of it." The use I have made of it is to put it carefully away among other treasured objects, picked up at odd times in out-of-the-way places. It may be that some minute mysterious insect or infinitesimal mite--there is almost certain to be a special walnut mite--has found an entrance into this prized nut and fed on its oily meat, reducing it within to a rust-coloured powder. The grub or mite, or whatever it is, may do so at its pleasure, and flourish and grow fat, and rear a numerous family, and get them out if it can; but all these corroding processes and changes going on inside the shell do not in the least diminish my nut's intrinsic value. XXVII A STORY OF A JACKDAW