"What a goose I was!" said Clara, doing her thinking aloud. "But I thought it must be something dreadful, when Edie screamed so."
"How much better it would have been to have found out before you screamed!" replied Miss Harson.--"But come, Edith; see what a nice cane Malcolm has just cut to help your lame foot with. He is offering you his arm, too, on the other side, and between the two I think you will get along finely."
Edith thought the same thing, and enjoyed being helped home in this fashion. Her foot was quite painful, though, and considerably swollen; and Clara bathed it with arnica when the little girl had been comfortably established on the schoolroom sofa.
"Perhaps," said Miss Harson, "our little invalid will not care to hear about trees this evening?"
THE CUT-LEAVED WHITE BIRCH.
But the little invalid did care, and it was decided to take a further ramble among the birches.
"I want to hear about birch-bark," said Malcolm--"not the kind we've been eating, but the kind that canoes and things are made of."
"You have already heard about the black birch," replied his governess, "and, besides this, we have the white, or gray, birch, the bark of which is white, chalky and dotted with black; the red birch, with bark of a reddish or chocolate color; the yellow birch, bark yellowish, with a silvery lustre; and the canoe birch, which has a white bark with a pearly lustre. There is also a dwarf, or shrub, birch. The list, you see, is quite a long one."
"What kind grow in our woods?" asked Clara.