"No one hastens home at twilight, Waiting for my hand to wave."
Christine's dreary singing would hardly have enlivened Mr. Muldweber's spirits if he had heard it; but it ceased ere she came close up to him. With his usual gallantry the old man spread his handkerchief on the grass covering the broken mound for Christine to rest on, and before darkness had spread over the plain and crept up to the mountain-tops, she knew more of the old man's history--which was the history of the linden tree--than she had ever expected to learn. He had learned to love the girl during the few days that the fitting-up of the house had thrown them together; and he could speak his mother tongue to her--he never would have said so much in English.
When he had left the mining-school at Freiberg in the Fatherland to come to the great America, he had brought with him from the old _Edelhof_, where he was born and raised, a handful of seed from the linden trees that formed his favorite avenue. He meant to build up just such a place in America, and he carried the linden seed with him through the United States and then into Mexico, where his knowledge of scientific mining was of more use at that time. Into Mexico he carried his bride, a young German girl, whose parents had died on their way out from the Fatherland, and who died herself of _Heimweh_, in the strange, wild land to which her husband brought her. But she left him a son, to whom he gave a new mother, a dark-eyed señorita from Durango. Then he drifted on toward California, before it was California to us, and settled finally in the Pueblo of San Jose, near the mission of Santa Clara, after it had ceased to be a mission. Here he built the old _adobe_--a house quite pretentious for those times, and he threw up the mound, smooth and round, and discernible at some distance, and planted the linden seed he had so carefully hoarded. But he did not sow the seed broadcast; it was a tree for every member of the family--no more. As the señorita from Durango had presented him with quite a little herd of Muldwebers, however, he had begun to entertain hopes of growing something of a forest in the valley, when the dark eyes of the señorita were closed one dread night, and never opened again to the light of this world.