Betty Leicester by Sarah Orne Jewett

AS Betty shut the gate behind her one day and walked down the main street of Tideshead she felt more than ever as if the past four years had been a dream, and as if she were exactly the same girl who had paid that last visit when she was eleven years old. Yet she seemed to herself to have clearer eyes than before; her years of travel had taught her to observe, the best gift that traveling can bestow. She saw new beauties in the gardens and the queer-shaped porches over the front doors, and noticed particularly the cupolas of one or two barns that were clear and sharp in their good outlines. More than all, she was astonished at the beauty of the old trees. Tideshead was not a forest of maples, like many other New England towns, but there were oaks along the village streets, and ash-trees, and willows, beside great elms in stately rows, and silver poplars, and mountain ashes, and even some fruit-trees along the roadsides outside the village. Betty remembered a story that she had often heard with great interest about one of the old Tideshead ministers who had been much beloved, and whose influence was still felt. Every year he had brought ten trees from the woods and planted them either on the streets or in his neighbor's yards; one year he chose one sort of tree and the next another, and at last, when he grew older and could not go far afield in his search he asked his friends for fruit-trees and planted them for the benefit of wayfarers. These had made a delightful memorial of the good old man, but many of the trees had fallen by this time, and though everybody said that they ought to be replaced, and complained of such shiftless neglect, as usual what was everybody's business was nobody's business, and Tideshead looked as if it were sorry to be forgotten.

Betty had been used to the thrifty English and French care of woodlands, and felt as if it were a great pity not to take better care of the precious legacy. Aunt Barbara sometimes sent Jonathan and Seth Pond to care for the trees that needed pruning or covering at the roots, but hardly any one else in Tideshead did anything but chop them up and clear them away when they blew down.