lowers a handbook is compulsory. Such a
book as Alice Lounsberry's _The Wild Flower Book for Young People_
gives many details of the growth and nature of plants, told with a
story that makes the book unusually interesting, and will arouse your
enthusiasm to gather wild flowers and see how large a collection of
them you can make.

It is interesting, if you have any skill in painting, to make
water-color copies of all the flowers that you find; another good
occupation for wet days in the country.

Nuts and Blackberries

In nutting you want a hooked stick with which to pull down the
branches. For blackberries a hooked stick is not so important, but it
is well to have leather gloves. The blackberries ought to be dry when
they are picked. Rain takes their flavor away; so you should wait
until the sun comes again and restores it. One thing that you quickly
notice is that all blackberries are not after the same pattern. There
are different kinds, just as there are different kinds of strawberry
and raspberry. Some are hard and very closely built; some are loosely
built, with large cells which squash between the fingers; some come
between these two varieties; and there are still others. For eating on
the spot the softer ones are the best, but for cooking and for jam the
harder ones are equally good.

In picking blackberries you soon find that it is better to have the
sun at your back, because if it shines through the bush into your eyes
you cannot distinguish clearly between the shades of blackness. An
open basket full of blackberries is a radiant sight. Each of the
little cells has a point of light, and thousands of these together are
as gay as jewels.

No one need starve on the open road in September, for there is food on
every hedge--two good courses. Nuts are there as the standby, the
backbone of the meal, and after come blackberries, as pudding or
dessert. To pick the two for an hour, and then, resting beneath a
tree, to eat until all are gone--that is no bad way to have lunch. If
you take advice in this matter, you will not crack the nuts with your
teeth but between stones.

Ponds and Sailing Boats

Near the farm is certain to be either a pond or a stream. If it is a
clean and high pond, not in a hollow surrounded by trees, it will be
good to sail boats on. Sailing boats on inland water is much better
than on the sea, because, with a pond, directly the boat is fairly
started on its voyage you can run round th