otect. The clouds gather, the mists trail on the hills, ragged mosses
on the trees hang in wet festoons of gray, and look in the misty
distance like numberless cascades. It rains at last, a solid down-pour;
certain tree-trunks grow black, and the shining beech and birch and
poplar get a more vivid silver on their wet boles. The water is black
like ink. It is no longer even translucent, and overhead the red
scourges of the lightning fly, and the great thunder-roar of smitten
clouds rolls over us from hill to hill.

All these details you teach her and more, and paddle home with a mental
cargo of fresh joys and delicious memories. My young friend is
intelligent and clever, but she has never learned to observe. If she
wants to know how, there is a book will help her. Let her take with her
Ruskin's "Modern Painters." It will teach her much, not all. Nor do I
know of any other volume which will tell her more.[13] Despite its
faults, it has so many lessons in the modes of minute study of outside
nature that it becomes a valuable friend. Although ostensibly written to
aid artistic criticism, it does far more than this and yet not all.
Other books which might seem desirable are less so because they are
still more distinctly meant to teach or assist artists or amateurs. What
is yet wanted is a little treatise on the methods of observing exterior
nature. Above all it should be adapted to our own woods, skies, and
waters. What to look for as a matter of pleasure, and how to see and
record it, is a thing apart from such observation as leads to
classification, and is scientific in its aims. It is somewhat remote
also from the artist's study, which is a more complex business, and
tends to learn what can be rendered by pencil or brush and what cannot.
Its object at first is merely to give intelligent joy to the senses, to
cultivate them into acuteness, and to impress on the mind such records
as they ought to give us at their best.

[Footnote 13: "Frondes Agrestes," Ruskin, is a more handy book than
"Modern Painters," but is only selections from the greater volumes
recommended. "Deucalion" is yet harder reading, but will repay the
careful reader.]

Presuming the pupil to be like myself, powerless to use the pencil, she
is to learn how to put on paper in words what she sees. The result will
be what I may call _word-sketches_. Observe these are not to be for
other eyes. They make her diary of things seen and worthy of note.
Neither are