ader may
smile at the phrase "expression," but look at a tattered old birch, or a
silvery young beech-hole, "modest and maidenly, clean of limb," or a
lightning-scarred pine. Tree-study has advantages because it is always
within reach. The axe has been so ruthlessly wielded that you must go
far into the woods to get the best specimens of the pine, and the
forests about our Maine lakes and in the Adirondacks have been sadly
despoiled of their aristocrats. To see trees at their savage best one
must go South, and seek the white-oaks of Carolina, the cypress of
Florida, but the parks of Philadelphia and Baltimore afford splendid
studies, and so also do the mountains 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,