er
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
yard. There were three of them, giants of their kind, which filled
the east yard every spring as with mountains of white bloom,
breathing wide gusts of honey sweetness, and humming with bees.
Ellen believed that these trees had once stood in the Garden of
Eden, but she never expected to find them missing from the east yard
of a morning, for she remembered the angel with the flaming sword,
and she knew how one branch of the easternmost tree happened to be
blasted as if by fire. And she thought that these trees were happy,
and never sighed to the wind as the dark evergreens did, because
they had still the same blossoms and the same fruit that they had in
Eden, and so did not fairly know that they were not there still.
Sometimes Ellen, sitting underneath them on a low rib of rock on a
May morning, used to fancy with success that she and the trees were
together in that first garden which she had read about in the Bible.

Sometimes, after one of these successful imaginings, when Ellen's
mother called her into the house she would stare at her little
daughter uneasily, and give her a spoonful of a bitter spring
medicine which she had brewed herself. When Ellen's father, Andrew
Brewster, came home from the shop, she would speak to him aside as
he was washing his hands at the kitchen sink, and tell him that it
seemed to her that Ellen looked kind of "pindlin'." Then Andrew,
before he sat down at the dinner-table, would take Ellen's face in
his two moist hands, look at her with anxiety thinly veiled by
facetiousness, rub his rough, dark cheek against her soft, white one
until he had reddened it, then laugh, and tell her she looked like a
bo'sn. Ellen never quite knew what her father meant by bo'sn, but
she understood that it signified something very rosy and hearty
indeed.

Ellen's father always picked out for her the choicest and tenderest
bits of the humble dishes, and his keen eyes were more watchful of
her plate than of his own. Always after Ellen's mother had said to
her father that she thought Ellen looked pindling he was late