What else in the world was there to talk of?
He read no paper and heard no news and was of no politics; and if it
can be said that he had a philosophy of life it was a low-down one,
about on a level with that of a solitary old dog-badger who lives in an
earth he has excavated for himself with infinite pains in a strong
stubborn soil - his home and refuge in a hostile world.
Finally, casting about in my mind for some new subject of conversation -
for I was reluctant to leave him soon after so long an absence - it
occurred to me that we had not said anything about his one walnut tree.
Of all the other trees and the fruit he had gathered from them he had
already spoken. "By-the-way," I said, "did your walnut tree yield well
this year?"
"Yes, very well," he returned; then he checked himself and said,
"Pretty well, but I did not get much for them." And after a little
hesitation he added, "That reminds me of something I had forgotten.
Something I have been keeping for you - a little present."
He began to feel in the capacious pockets of his big outside waistcoat,
but found nothing. "I must give it up," he said; "I must have mislaid
it."
He seemed a little relieved, and at the same time a little
disappointed; and by-and-by, on my remarking that he had not felt in
all his pockets, began searching again, and in the end produced the
lost something - a walnut! Holding it up a moment, he presented it to me
with a little forward jerk of the hand and a little inclination of the
head; and that little gesture, so unexpected in him, served to show
that he had thought a good deal about giving the walnut away, and had
looked on it as rather an important present. It was, perhaps, the only
one he had ever made in his life. While giving it to me he said very
nicely, "Pray make use of it."
The use I have made of it is to put it carefully away among other
treasured objects, picked up at odd times in out-of-the-way places. It
may be that some minute mysterious insect or infinitesimal mite - there
is almost certain to be a special walnut mite - has found an entrance
into this prized nut and fed on its oily meat, reducing it within to a
rust-coloured powder. The grub or mite, or whatever it is, may do so at
its pleasure, and flourish and grow fat, and rear a numerous family,
and get them out if it can; but all these corroding processes and
changes going on inside the shell do not in the least diminish my nut's
intrinsic value.
