"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.