veway with four
great flowering cherry-trees, so old that many of the boughs would
never bud again, and thrust themselves like skeleton arms of death
through the soft masses of bloom out into the blue. One tree there
was which had scarcely any boughs left, for the winds had taken them,
and was the very torso of a tree; but Squire Eben Merritt would not
have even that cut, for he loved a tree past its usefulness as
faithfully as he loved an animal. "Well do I remember the cherries I
used to eat off that tree, when I was so high," Eben Merritt would
say. "Many a man has done less to earn a good turn from me than this
old tree, which has fed me with its best fruit. Do you think I'll
turn and kill it now?"

He had the roots of the old trees carefully dug about and tended,
though not a dead limb lopped. Nurture, and not surgery, was the
doctrine of Squire Merritt. "Let the earth take what it gave," he
said; "I'll not interfere."

Jerome had heard these sayings of Squire Merritt's about the trees.
They had been repeated, because people thought such ideas queer and
showing lack of common-sense. He had heard them unthinkingly, but
now, standing on Squire Merritt's door-step, looking at his old tree
pensioners, whom he would not desert in their infirmity, he
remembered, and the great man's love for his trees gave him reason,
with a sudden leap of faith, to believe in his kindness towards him.
"I'm better than an old tree," reasoned Jerome, and raised the
knocker again boldly and let it fall with a great brazen clang. Then
he jumped and almost fell backward when the door was flung open
suddenly, and there stood Squire Merritt himself.

"What the devil--" began Squire Merritt; then he stopped and chuckled
behind his great beard when he saw Jerome's alarmed eyes. "Hullo,"
said he, "who have we got here?" Eben Merritt had a soft place in
his heart for all small young creatures of his kind, and always
returned their timid obeisances, when he met them, with a friendly
smile twinkling like light through his bushy beard. Still, like many
a man of such general kindly bearings, he could not easily compass
details, and oftener than not could not have told which child he
greeted.

Eben Merritt, outside his own family, was utterly impartial in
magnanimity, and dealt with broad principles rather than individuals.
Now he looked hard at Jerome, and could not for the life of him tell
what particular boy he was, yet recognized him fully in