“We’ll keep our eyes open every time we come here,” promised Dorothy.  “There’s no reason why you couldn’t add a little root of this or that any time you want to.”

[Illustration:  Partridge Berry]

“I know Aunty will be delighted with it,” cried Della, much pleased.  “She likes all plants, but especially things that are a little bit different.  That’s why she spends so much time selecting her wall vases—­so that they shall be unlike other people’s.”

“Fitz-James’s woods,” as they already called the bit of forest that Dorothy hoped to have possession of, extended back from the road and spread until it joined Grandfather Emerson’s woods on one side and what was called by the Rosemonters “the West Woods” on the other.  The girls walked home by a path that took them into Rosemont not far from the station where Della was to take the train.

“Until you notice what there really is in the woods in winter you think there isn’t anything worth looking at,” said Ethel Blue, walking along with her eyes in the tree crowns.

“The shapes of the different trees are as distinct now as they are in summer,” declared Ethel Brown.  “You’d know that one was an oak, and the one next to it a beech, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know whether I would or not,” confessed Dorothy honestly, “but I can almost always tell a tree by its bark.”

“I can tell a chestnut by its bark nowadays,” asserted Ethel Blue, “because it hasn’t any!”

“What on earth do you mean?” inquired city-bred Della.

“Something or other has killed all the chestnuts in this part of the world in the last two or three years.  Don’t you see all these dead trees standing with bare trunks?”

“Poor old things!  Is it going to last?”

“It spread up the Hudson and east and west in New York and Massachusetts, and south into Pennsylvania.”

“Roger was telling Grandfather a few days ago that a farmer was telling him that he thought the trouble—­the pest or the blight or whatever it was—­had been stopped.”

“I remember now seeing a lot of dead trees somewhere when one of Father’s parishioners took us motoring in the autumn.  I didn’t know the chestnut crop was threatened.”

“Chestnuts weren’t any more expensive this year.  They must have imported them from far-off states.”

There were still pools of water in the wood path, left by the melting snow, and the grass that they touched seemed a trifle greener than that beside the narrow road.  Once in a while a bit of vivid green betrayed a plant that had found shelter under an overhanging stone.  The leaves were for the most part dry enough again to rustle under their feet.  Evergreens stood out sharply dark against the leafless trees.

“What are the trees that still have a few leaves left clinging to them?” asked Della.

“Oaks.  Do you know why the leaves stay on?”

“Is it a story?”