owards the Pentland Hills. The face of one of
these summits (say two leagues from where we stood) is marked with a
procession of white scars. And to this she directed my attention.

"You see those marks?" she said. "We call them the Seven Sisters. Follow a
little lower with your eye, and you will see a fold of the hill, the tops
of some trees, and a tail of smoke out of the midst of them. That is
Swanston cottage, where my brother and I are living."

--Stevenson: _St. Ives_.
(Copyright, 1897. Charles Scribner's Sons.)

Notice in the selection below that for objects _near at hand_ details so
small as the lizard's eye are given, but that these details are not given,
when we are asked to observe things far away.

Slow though their march had been, by this time _they had come to the end
of the avenue, and were in the wide circular sweep before the castle._
They stopped here and stood looking off over the garden, with its somber
cypresses and bright beds of geranium, down upon the valley, dim and
luminous in a mist of gold. Great, heavy, fantastic-shaped clouds,
pearl-white with pearl-gray shadows, piled themselves up against the
scintillant dark blue of the sky. In and out among the rose trees _near at
hand_, where the sun was hottest, heavily flew, with a loud bourdonnement,
the cockchafers promised by Annunziata,--big, blundering, clumsy, the
scorn of their light-winged and businesslike competitors, the bees.
Lizards lay immobile as lizards cast in bronze, only their little
glittering, watchful pin heads of eyes giving sign of life. And of course
the blackcaps never for a moment left off singing.

--Henry Habland: _My Friend Prospero_ ("McClure's").

_We round a corner of the valley, and beyond, far below us, looms the town
of Sorata. From this distance_ the red tile roofs, the soft blue, green,
and yellow of its stuccoed walls, look indescribably fresh and grateful. A
closer inspection will probably dissipate this impression; it will be
squalid and dirty, the river-stone paving of its street will be deep in
the accumulation of filth, dirty Indian children will swarm in them with
mangy dogs and bedraggled ducks, the gay frescoes of its walls will peel
in ragged patches, revealing the 'dobe of their base, and the tile roofs
will be cracked and broken. But from the heights at this distance and in
the warm glow of the afternoon sun it looks like a dainty fairy village
glistening in a magic splendor against the Tita