"Until you notice what there really is in the woods in winter you think there isn't anything worth looking at," said Ethel Blue, walking along with her eyes in the tree crowns.
"The shapes of the different trees are as distinct now as they are in summer," declared Ethel Brown. "You'd know that one was an oak, and the one next to it a beech, wouldn't you?"
"I don't know whether I would or not," confessed Dorothy honestly, "but I can almost always tell a tree by its bark."
"I can tell a chestnut by its bark nowadays," asserted Ethel Blue, "because it hasn't any!"
"What on earth do you mean?" inquired city-bred Della.
"Something or other has killed all the chestnuts in this part of the world in the last two or three years. Don't you see all these dead trees standing with bare trunks?"
"Poor old things! Is it going to last?"
"It spread up the Hudson and east and west in New York and Massachusetts, and south into Pennsylvania."
"Roger was telling Grandfather a few days ago that a farmer was telling him that he thought the trouble—the pest or the blight or whatever it was—had been stopped."
"I remember now seeing a lot of dead trees somewhere when one of Father's parishioners took us motoring in the autumn. I didn't know the chestnut crop was threatened."