eed on
the moss and dash some water on it from the tips of my fingers. Another
finger bowl upside down makes the cover. The sick person can see what is
going on inside right through the glass without having to raise her
head."

"How often do you water it?"

"Only once or twice a week, because the moisture collects on the upper
glass of the little greenhouse and falls down again on the plants and
keeps them, wet."

"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