of Virginia.  Private taste and enterprise is saving already much that will be a joy to our children.  A noble instance is the great wild park with which Colonel Parsons has protected the Natural Bridge in Virginia.  I saw there an arbor-vitae said by botanists to be not less than nine hundred years old, a chestnut twenty-six feet in girth at the height of my shoulders, and oaks past praise.  But trees are everywhere, and if my observant pupil likes them, let her next note the mode in which the branches spread and their proportion to the trunk.  State it all in the fewest words.  It is to be only a help to memory.  Then she comes to the leaf forms and the mode in which they are massed, their dulness or translucency, how sunshine affects their brilliancy, as it is above or falls laterally at morn or eve.  Perhaps she will note, too, on which the gray moss grows, and just in what forms, and how the mosses or lichens gather on the north side of trees and on what trees.

I may help my pupil if, like an artist teacher, I give one or two illustrations, copied verbatim from my note-books.  The first was written next morning, as it is a brief record of a night scene.

Time, July 21, 1887, 9 P.M.  Ristigouche River, New Brunswick, Canada.  Black darkness.  Hill outlines nearly lost in sky.  River black, with flashing bits of white rapid; banks have grayish rocks, and so seem to be nearer than the dark stream limits.  Sky looks level with hill-tops.  Water seems to come up close.  Effect of being in a concave valley of water, and all things draw in on me.  Sense of awe.  Camp-fire’s red glare on water.  Sudden opening lift of sky.  Hills recede.  Water-level falls.  This is a barren, unadorned sketch, but it seems to tell the thing.

Or this, for a change.  Newport.  A beach.  Time, August 1, 1887; 4 P.M.  About me cleft rocks, cleavage straight through the embedded pebbles.  Tones ruddy browns and grays.  Gray beach.  Sea-weed in heaps, deep pinks and purples.  Boisterous waves, loaded with reddish seaweed, blue, with white crests, torn off in long ribbons by wind.  Curious reds and blues as waves break, carrying sea-weed.  Fierce gale off land.  Dense fog, sun above it and to right.  Everywhere yellow light.  Sea strange dingy yellow.  Leaves an unnatural green.  Effect weird.  Sense of unusualness.

Of course, such study of nature leads the intelligent to desire to know why the cleaved rock shows its sharp divisions as if cut by a knife, why yellow light gives such strangeness of tints, and thus draws on my pupil to larger explanatory studies.  So much the better.

If when she bends over a foot-square area of mouldered tree-trunk, deep in the silence of a Maine wood, she has a craving to know the names and ways of the dozen mosses she notes, of the minute palm-like growths, of the odd toadstools, it will not lessen the joy this liliputian representation of a tropical jungle gives to her.  Nor will she like less the splendor of sunset tints on water to know the secrets of the pleasant tricks of refraction and reflection.