“Your bathroom's a total loss and the extension on that side is pretty badly scorched up, but the rest of the place, excusing damage by the water and the smoke, is hardly damaged,” added the younger Tilghman. “You'll be able to move back in, inside of a month, judge.” “And in the meantime you're going to stay right here, Judge Priest, and make my house your home,” announced Mr. Tilghman, Senior. “It's mighty plain, but such as it is you're welcome to it, judge. We'll do our level best to make you comfortable. Only I'm afraid you'll miss the things you've been used to having round you.” “Oh, I reckin not,” said Judge Priest. His glance travelled slowly from the crayon portrait at the foot of the bed to Jeff Poindexter's chocolate-coloured face and back again to the portrait. “I've got mighty near everything I need to make me happy.” “What I meant was that maybe you'd be kind of lonesome away from your own house,” Mr. Tilghman said. “No, I don't believe so,” answered the old man, smiling a little. “You see, I taken the cure for lonesomeness to-night. You mout call it the smoke cure.” CHAPTER VI. THE FAMILY TREE THE family tree of the Van Nicht family was not the sort of family tree you think I mean, although they had one of that variety too. This was a real tree. It was an elm--the biggest elm and the broadest and the most majestic elm in the entire state, and in the times of its leafage cast the densest shade of any elm to be found anywhere, probably. For more than one hundred years the Van Nicht family had lived in its shadow. That was the principal trouble with them--they did live in the shadow. I'll come to that later. Every consequential visitor to Schuylerville was taken to see the Van Nicht elm. It was a necessary detail of his tour about town. Either before or after he had viewed the new ten-story skyscraper of the Seaboard National Bank, and the site for the projected Civic Centre, and the monument to Schuyler County's defenders of the Union--1861-'65--with a dropsical bronze figure of a booted and whiskered infantryman on top of the tall column, and the Henrietta Wing Memorial Library, and the rest of it, they took him and they showed him the Van Nicht elm. So doing, it was incumbent upon them to escort him through a street which was beginning to wear that vacillating, uncertain look any street wears while trying to make up its mind whether to keep on being a quiet residential byway in an old-fashioned town or to turn itself into an important thoroughfare of a thriving industrial centre. You know the kind of street I aim to picture--with here an impudent young garage showing its shining morning face of red brick in a side yard where there used to be an orchard, and there a new apartment building which has shouldered its way into a line of ancient dwellings and is driving its cast-iron cornices, like rude elbows, into the clapboarded short ribs of its neighbours upon either side.