young leaves were pricking through the lattice-work; it was old and
needed trimming; there were many long barren shoots of last year.
However, Squire Merritt guarded jealously the freedom of the rose,
and would not have it meddled with, arguing that it had thriven thus
since the time of his grandfather, who had planted it; that this was
its natural condition of growth, and it would die if pruned.

Jerome looked out of this door-arbor, garlanded with the old
rose-vine, into a great yard, skirted beyond the driveway 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