This last was for my benefit; I had not shown as much readiness to enter the gate as had my companion. "Come right in." So I went in. The next remark of the old man did much to put everything on an agreeable footing. "Do you boys like peaches?" We did like peaches, and we said so. "Well, just wait till I pull up two or three of these plantains, an' we'll go round to the side of the house an' see if there's any on the tree.... There ... now come on." We followed him around the corner of the house. A black cat with a white breast came running to meet his master. "Hullo, here's Nickerdemus; I told him to watch the peaches. Did yer keep the bees away, Nickerdemus?" Nicodemus yawned and gave every sign of having been asleep, after the manner of his kind when there is no personal advantage in keeping awake. The captain put a ladder against the tree, climbed up, and began to drop peaches to us. Until then I had a faint suspicion that he might be merely luring us on and on toward the room where sat the pumpkin family. But all such suspicions vanished now. You cannot think ill of a man who gives you peaches like those. Ed Mason intended to find out about the old elm tree, and he broached the subject fearlessly. "Cap'n, Sam says that _you_ said they planted a piece of willow where the old elm came up." "What's that? No; they didn't plant no willow, but all this about the young feller that came callin' on his girl, an' cut a stick to keep off the dogs, an' stuck the stick in the ground in front of her door, an' then went away an' forgot it, an' the tree grew outer that stick,--all that's bosh. Don't yer believe it." We promised not to believe it. The captain came down the ladder with two more peaches, which he passed over to us. He stood, watching us eat them, and enlarged on the subject of the tree. "I know all 'bout it, 'cos my second cousin, Silas Winkley, lived there, an' his great-gran'father planted that there tree jus' like any other tree. Silas's great-gran'father, ol' Deacon Plummer, wa'n't callin' on any girls there, 'cos he was up'ards of seventy when he planted the tree, an' had children an' gran'-children of his own. These here poems is all cat's-foot-in-yer-pocket!" We did not know exactly what that meant, but it seemed to cast some doubt on the truth of the legend, at any rate. "Silas Winkley," ruminated the Captain, "thought he was a sailor. He went two or three v'yges with ol' Dick Cutter an' fin'lly he got Melvin Bailey,--gran'-father of _this_ Melvin that's alive now, to give him command of a ship. I've heard my father tell 'bout it lots of times,--he was second mate. She was the _Nanny Karr_,--spelt it with a K, they did then. Well, Silas took her down as fur as Nantucket all right,--hee, hee, hee!" Here Captain Bannister paused and chuckled for a few moments.