Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/11



HESTNUT STREET led off Main at right angles. It shot up over a hill straight and uncompromisingly, and down again on the other side. At the crest of the hill the Jerome house stood—a huge, plain, square affair painted battleship gray, and approached by three formidable flights of granite steps. A dozen pointed blue spruces had been set out on the sloping ground in front of the house, at measured intervals, like so many birthday candles on a cake—a cake with a smooth white frosting, for it was winter now, and a nicely finished edge, for the Jerome place was bordered by a three-foot granite curb. On either side of the first flight of steps, there were rectangular pillars—miniature Bunker Hill monuments, pointed at the top, with the number eighty-pine painted on the face of each of them, in big white figures on a black ground.

From the street there wasn't a tree to be seen at 89 Chestnut Street, except the spruces—nor a shrub, nor a bush, nor a vine, nor a trellis for a vine. It was a scrupulous, bare-looking place. It suggested government property—something military and rigid. Pyramids of cannon-balls wouldn't have looked out of place on the Jerome lawn. In the summertime there