When Elizabeth returned with the little tree, David was as entranced with it as she had been. It stood on the edge of the basin in the last of the failing twilight and, in its airy grace of form and glittering of jade and jewels, it seemed scarcely a thing of reality at all. Miss Miranda laid her knitting on her knee for the light was gone at last. The sunset colors had faded in the water and the fireflies were beginning to wink and shine in the shadows of the pine trunks as she began. CHAPTER VII THE TREE OF JADE From the time when they first went to the dame school to learn their letters, Jonathan Adams and Humphrey Reynolds spent most of their waking hours in each other’s company. They looked for birds’ nests together in the woods at the edge of the broad Susquehanna River, they paddled along its marshy banks, they played absorbing games in that busy, entrancing place, Jonathan’s father’s shipyard. Or they would stand side by side watching a great ship of war come sailing up the bay, a flying vision of square white sails and darkly outlined rigging, the vessel that was commanded by Captain Reynolds, Humphrey’s father. The two boys talked much of what they would do when they were men; they would sit for long hours on the wharf, their legs dangling above the water, discussing the future. “I am going into the Navy like my father,” Humphrey would say, “and I intend to sail in the finest and fastest ship of the whole fleet to the very ends of the world and back again. And I will have you for executive officer, Jonathan.” “No,” Jonathan would return seriously, “I get sick when I go to sea and I don’t like hardtack and salt pork. No, I will stop at home in my father’s yards and some day I will build a ship that is a real ship and not just tubs like these.”