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, 1887; 4 P.M.
About me cleft rocks, cleavage straight through the embedded pebbles.
Tones ruddy browns and grays. Gray beach. Sea-weed in heaps, deep pinks
and purples. Boisterous waves, loaded with reddish seaweed, blue, with
white crests, torn off in long ribbons by wind. Curious reds and blues
as waves break, carrying sea-weed. Fierce gale off land. Dense fog, sun
above it and to right. Everywhere yellow light. Sea strange dingy
yellow. Leaves an unnatural green. Effect weird. Sense of unusualness.

Of course, such study of nature leads the intelligent to desire to know
why the cleaved rock shows its sharp divisions as if cut by a knife, why
yellow light gives such strangeness of tints, and thus draws on my pupil
to larger explanatory studies. So much the better.

If when she bends over a foot-square area of mouldered tree-trunk, deep
in the silence of a Maine wood, she has a craving to know the names and
ways of the dozen mosses she notes, of the minute palm-like growths, of