"Certainly!--if you understand the business. Do you know a pine knot when you see it?"
He laughed and shook his head, but avowed a wish to learn.
"Well, it would be a charity to teach you anything wholesome," said Fleda, "for I heard one of Mr. Olmney's friends lately saying that he looked like a person who was in danger of committing suicide."
"Suicide!--One of my friends!"--he exclaimed in the utmost astonishment.
"Yes," said Fleda laughing;--"and there is nothing like the open air for clearing away vapours."
"You cannot have known that by experience," said he looking at her.
Fleda shook her head and advising him to take nothing for granted, set off into the woods.
They were in a beautiful state. A light snow but an inch or two deep had fallen the night before; the air had been perfectly still during the day; and though the sun was out, bright and mild, it had done little but glitter on the earth's white capping. The light dry flakes of snow had not stirred from their first resting-place. The long branches of the large pines were just tipped with snow at the ends; on the smaller evergreens every leaf and tuft had its separate crest. Stones and rocks were smoothly rounded over, little shrubs and sprays that lay along the ground were all doubled in white; and the hemlock branches, bending with their feathery burthen, stooped to the foreheads of the party and gave them the freshest of salutations as they brushed by. The whole wood-scene was particularly fair and graceful. A light veil of purity, no more, thrown over the wilderness of stones and stumps and bare ground,--like the blessing of charity, covering all roughnesses and unsightlinesses--like the innocent unsullied nature that places its light shield between the eye and whatever is unequal, unkindly, and unlovely in the world.
"What do you think of this for a misanthropical man, Mr. Olmney? there's a better tonic to be found in the woods than in any remedies of man's devising."
"Better than books?" said he.