in your canoe with you, and ask her what she sees. As a rule she has a
general sense that yonder yellow bank, tree-crowned above the rippled
water, is pleasant. The sky is blue, the sun falling behind you. She
says it is beautiful and has a vague sense of enjoyment, and will carry
away with her little more than this. Point out to her that the trees
above are some of them deciduous poplars, or maples, and others sombre
groups of pines and silky tamarack with a wonder of delicate tracery.
Show her that the sun against the sloped yellow bank has covered the
water with a shining changeful orange light, through which gleam the
mottled stones below, and that the concave curve of every wave which
faces us concentrates for the eye an unearthly sapphire the reflex of
the darkening blue above us. Or a storm is on us at the same place. She
is fearless as to the ducking from which even her waterproof will hardly
protect. 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