“Ask Tom,—it will amuse you.” She did so.
“Them trees, when there’s a fire, and there ain’t too many pines and firs, the fire it just eats up their leaves and scorches their hides.”
“Bark?”
“Yes; and the winds and the frost and the sun, they peels off the dead hides. After that them trees lasts powerful long. But if the bark be on, they rots.”
“What I want just now, Rose, is to get you to look at those few isolated skeletons of dead trees on the point. There are many as odd in the wood-tangle below, but these above you can more readily sketch for me, because they stand by themselves. We will come back to the rest by and by.”
“Oh, my dear, dear M. A., what a fine master you are! I used to long for you, and that book we were to write, on the ‘Art of Seeing.’”
“Yes, I have taught myself to see. While you are sketching I will lecture a little.”
“And just what do you wish me to draw?”
“Take your field-glass and look at the trees on the point. Now, the one at the edge,—look at it; I do not want to tell you about it, I want you to see.”
“Well,” said Rose, talking as she sat in the tent-shadow, the glass at her eyes, “I see a tall dead tree,—a fir? No, a dead spruce,—probably a spruce, I am not sure. It is gray, and has only two great limbs left, and a tuft of dead twigs above—and—the trunk is oddly twisted to the left.”