shead 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.

It seemed very strange that all the old houses were so handsome and all
the new ones so ugly. A stranger might wonder, why, with the good
proportions, and even a touch of simple elegance that the house builders
of the last century almost always gave, their successors seemed to have
no idea of either, and to take no lessons from the good models before
their eyes. "Makeshifts o' splendor," sensible old Serena called some of
the new houses which had run much to cheap decoration and irregular
roofs and fancy colors of paint. But the old minister's elms and willows
hung their green boughs before some of these architectural failures as
if to kindly screen them from the passers-by. They looked like
imitations of houses, one or two of them, and as if they were put down
to fill spaces, and not meant to live in, as the old plain-roofed and
wide-roomed dwellings are. The sober old village looked here and there
as if it were a placid elderly lady upon whom a