On the west side of Ellen's father's house was a file of Norway
spruce-trees, standing with a sharp pointing of dark boughs towards
the north, which gave them an air of expectancy of progress.

Every morning Ellen, whose bedroom faced that way, looked out with a
firm belief that she would see them on the other side of the stone
wall, advanced several paces towards their native land. She had no
doubt of their ability to do so; their roots, projecting in fibrous
sprawls from their trunks, were their feet, and she pictured them
advancing with wide trailings, and rustlings as of green draperies,
and a loudening of that dreamy cry of theirs which was to her
imagination a cry of homesickness reminiscent of their old life in
the White north. When Ellen had first heard the name Norway spruce,
'way back in her childhood--so far back, though she was only seven
and a half now, that it seemed to her like a memory from another
life--she had asked her mother to show her Norway on the map, and
her strange convictions concerning the trees had seized her. When
her mother said that they had come from that northernmost land of
Europe, Ellen, to whose childhood all truth was naked and literal,
immediately conceived to herself those veritable trees advancing
over the frozen seas around the pole, and down through the vast
regions which were painted blue on her map, straight to her father's
west yard. There they stood and sang the songs of their own country,
with a melancholy sweetness of absence and longing, and were forever
thinking to return. Ellen felt always a thrill of happy surprise
when she saw them still there of a morning, for she felt that she
would miss them sorely when they were gone. She said nothing of all
this to her mother; it was one of the secrets of the soul which
created her individuality and made her a spiritual birth. She was
also silent about her belief concerning the cherry-trees in the east