re is so
little to excite the alarm of a timid maiden.

It was fortunate for Philip that Miss McDonald took a liking to him.
They were thrown much together. They were both good walkers, and liked
to climb the hills and explore the wild mountain streams. Philip would
have confessed that he was fond of nature, and fancied there was a sort
of superiority in his attitude towards it to that of his companion, who
was merely interested in plants-just a botanist. This attitude, which
she perceived, amused Miss McDonald.

"If you American students," she said one day when they were seated on a
fallen tree in the forest, and she was expatiating on a rare plant she
had found, "paid no more attention to the classics than to the world you
live in, few of you would get a degree."

"Oh, some fellows go in for that sort of thing," Philip replied. "But
I have noticed that all English women have some sort of fad--plants,
shells, birds, something special."

"Fad!" exclaimed the Scotchwoman. "Yes, I suppose it is, if reading is
a fad. It is one way of finding out about things. You admire what
the Americans call scenery; we, since you provoke me to say it, love
nature--I mean its individual, almost personal manifestations. Every
plant has a distinct character of its own. I saw the other day an
American landscape picture with a wild, uncultivated foreground. There
was not a botanical thing in it. The man who painted it didn't know a
sweetbrier from a thistle.

"Just a confused mass of rubbish. It was as if an animal painter should
compose a group and you could not tell whether it was made up of sheep
or rabbits or dogs or foxes or griffins."

"So you want things picked out like a photograph?"

"I beg your pardon, I want nature. You cannot give character to a bit of
ground in a landscape unless you know the characters of its details. A
man is no more fit to paint a landscape than a cage of monkeys, unless
he knows the language of the nature he is dealing with down to the
alphabet. The Japanese know it so well that they are not bothered with
minutia, but give you character."

"And you think that science is an aid to art?"

"Yes, if there is genius to transform it into art. You must know the
intimate habits of anything you paint or write about. You cannot even
caricature without that. They talk now about Dickens being just a
caricaturist. He couldn't have been that if he hadn't known the things
he caricatured. That is the reason there