It was in Tripoli on a day when Captain Reynolds was walking from one dark cupboard of a shop to another, looking for some fitting gift to take home to Miranda, that he was suddenly startled by the sight of a pale face among all those dusky ones. It was not white, but yellow, and belonged to an old Chinaman, as dried up and withered as a mummy, who had somehow wandered, a rare thing in those days, to this African city and kept a little shop there among the Moors, Arabs and Berbers of Tripoli. His wares were different from the others and very new indeed to Humphrey’s eyes, for just such carvings and silks did not often find their way to America. The old man invited the officer to come inside where more articles stood upon the narrow shelves and where Humphrey had almost decided upon the purchase of a beautifully carved ivory box for Miranda when he spied, in a niche opposite the tiny window, such a thing as he had never seen before. A little pine tree was growing in a pot, a real, living one, and a miniature of just such a tree, bent and twisted by the sea winds, that grew upon the hill above the Susquehanna at home. The art of stunting and pruning these tiny trees, developed in Japan perhaps, but known to some Chinese, was quite unheard of in the Western world so that Humphrey could scarcely believe his eyes when they told him it was green and growing and evidently kin to the giant ones in America. “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!