1887; 4 P.M.
About me cleft rocks, cleavage straight through the embedded pebbles.
Tones ruddy browns and grays. Gray beach. Sea-weed in heaps, deep pinks
and purples. Boisterous waves, loaded with reddish seaweed, blue, with
white crests, torn off in long ribbons by wind. Curious reds and blues
as waves break, carrying sea-weed. Fierce gale off land. Dense fog, sun
above it and to right. Everywhere yellow light. Sea strange dingy
yellow. Leaves an unnatural green. Effect weird. Sense of unusualness.

Of course, such study of nature leads the intelligent to desire to know
why the cleaved rock shows its sharp divisions as if cut by a knife, why
yellow light gives such strangeness of tints, and thus draws on my pupil
to larger explanatory studies. So much the better.

If when she bends over a foot-square area of mouldered tree-trunk, deep
in the silence of a Maine wood, she has a craving to know the names and
ways of the dozen mosses she notes, of the minute palm-like growths, of
the odd toadstools, it will not lessen the joy this liliputian
representation of a tropical jungle gives to her. Nor will she like less
the splendor of sunset tints on water to know the secrets of the
pleasant tricks of refraction and reflection.

I do not want to make too much of a small matter. No doubt many people
do this kind of thing, but in most volumes of travel it is easy to see
that the descriptions lack method, and show such want of training in
observation as would not be noticeable had their authors gone through
the modest studies I am now inviting my pupil to make.

Her temptation will be to note most the large, the grotesque, or the
startling aspects of nature. In time these will be desirable as studies,
but at first she must try smaller and limited sketches. They are as
difficult, but do not change as do the grander scenes and objects. I
knew a sick girl, who, bedfast for years, used to amuse herself with
what her windows and an opera-glass commanded in the way of sky and
foliage. The buds in spring-time, especially the horse-chestnuts, were
the subject of quite curious notes, and cloud-forms an endless source of
joy and puzzle to describe. One summer a great effort was made, and she
was taken to the country, and a day or two later carried down near a
brook, where they swung her hammock. I found her quite busy a week
later, and happy in having discovered that the wave-curves over a rock
were like the curves of some shells. My pu