Doctor and Patient Part 5

The strong animal is, as a rule, the least liable to damaging emotion and its consequences. Train your girls physically, and, up to the age of adolescence, as you train your boys. Too many mothers make haste to recognize the s.e.xual difference. To run, to climb, to swim, to ride, to play violent games, ought to be as natural to the girl as to the boy.

All this is fast changing for us, and for the better. When I see young girls sweating from a good row or the tennis-field, I know that it is preventive medicine. I wish I saw how to widen these useful habits so as to give like chances to the poor, and I trust the time will come when the mechanic and the laborer shall insist on public play-grounds as the right of his little ones.[8]

[Footnote 8: The demagogue urges his rights to much that he cannot have in any conceivable form of society. Let him ask for free libraries, free baths, free music, and, above all, free and ample play-grounds within easy reach. I wonder that the rich who endow colleges do not ever think of creating play-grounds. I wish I could open some large pockets by an appeal to hearts at large.]

The tender mother, who hates dirt and loves neatness, and does not like to hear her girls called tom-boys, may and does find it hard to cultivate this free out-door life for her girls even when easy means make the matter less difficult than it is for the caged dweller in cities during a large portion or the whole of a year.

I may leave her to see that delicacy and modesty find place enough in her educational trainings, but let her also make sure that her girls have whatever chance she can afford to live out of doors, and to use the sports which develop the muscles and give tone and vigor. Even in our winters and in-doors, she can try to encourage active games such as shuttlec.o.c.k and graces. I know of homes where the girls put on the gloves, and stand up with their brothers, and take gallantly the harmless blows which are so valuable a training in endurance and self-control.

I am reminded as I write that what I say applies and must apply chiefly to the leisure cla.s.s; but in others there is a good deal of manual work done of necessity, and, after all, the leisure cla.s.s is one which is rapidly increasing in America, and which needs, especially among its new recruits, the very kind of advice I am now giving. Severer games, such as cricket, which I see girls playing with their brothers, tennis, fencing, and even boxing, have for both s.e.xes moral values. They teach, or some of them teach, endurance, contempt of little hurts, obedience to laws, control of temper, in a word, much that under ordinary circ.u.mstances growing girls do not get out of their gentler games. These are worth some risks, and such as they are need not trouble seriously the most careful mother. Neither need she fear for girls up to the age of p.u.b.erty that they are any more liable to serious damage than are her boys.

When for her young daughters this time of change comes near, she may rest a.s.sured that their thorough physical training will have good results. Beyond this point it is hard to generalize, and, of course, the more violent games, in which girl and boy are or may be as one, must cease But each case must stand alone, and so be judged. There are plenty of healthy girls who may continue to row, to ride, to swim, to walk as before, but there are individual cases as to which advice is needed, although, as to all girls, it should be the rule that at certain times temperate exercise, lessened walks, and no dancing, riding, rowing, skating, or swimming should be allowed. Girls feel these restrictions less if they are so stringently taught from the outset as to become habits, and this is all I care to say.

Once past the critical years, and there is no reason why the ma.s.s of women should not live their own lives as men live theirs, except that always, in my opinion, the prudent woman will at certain times save herself. It is still true that even healthy women exercise too little.

Our climate makes walking unpleasant, and to get in a good sweat in summer, or to wade through slush in winter, is hateful to the female soul. The English reproach us with this defect, and rightly, but do not estimate the difficulties of climate. Australian women walk little, and the English dame who comes to this country to live soon succ.u.mbs to the despotism of climate and abandons her habits of ample exercise afoot.

The in-door resources of women for chest and arm exertion are sadly few, and I think it fortunate when they are so situated as to have to do things in the household which exact vigorous use of the upper extremities. Nothing is a better ally against nervousness or irritability in any one than either out-door exercise or pretty violent use of the muscles. I knew a nervously-inclined woman who told me that when she was losing self-control she was accustomed to seek her own room, and see how long she could keep up a shuttlec.o.c.k without a failure. As to weather, again, I should say the worse the weather the better the exercise of a brisk walk; and my wise mother shall see that her girls do not dawdle about in-doors, but get a good tramp under all skies as a part of the habits of life. A st.u.r.dy struggle with a rough day blows the irritability and nervousness of the hour out of any but the truly sick, and I know as to some folks that the more they are out of doors the better they are morally as well as physically.

My ideal mother has looked on and seen her daughters grow up to be strong and vigorous. When the time came, she has not forgotten that she has had and has to deal with one of her own s.e.x. During the years of their childhood she should understand, as concerns her girls, that to differentiate too largely their moral lessons from those of their brothers is unwise. Something as to this I have said in a former chapter as concerns the training of invalid children. It applies also to the well. The boy is taught self-control, repression of emotion, not to cry when hurt. Teach your girls these things, and you will in the end a.s.sure to them that habitual capacity to suffer moral and physical ill without exterior show of emotion, which is so true an aid to the deeper interior control which subdues emotion at its sources, or robs it of its power to harm. Physical strength and an out-door life will make this lesson easy and natural. Be certain that weakness of body fosters and excuses emotional non-restraint, and that under long illness the most hardy man may become as nervously foolish as a spoiled child. Crave, then, for your girls strength and bodily power of endurance, and with this insist that the boy's code of emotional control shall be also theirs. But to do all this you must begin with them young, and not have to make each year undo the failure of the last. A dog-trainer once told me that it was a good thing to whip the smallest pups with a straw, and to teach them good habits, or try to do so, from birth. He put it strongly; but be sure that if we wish to build habits thoroughly into the mental and physical structure of childhood, we shall do well to begin early. As regards the out-door life, I shall have something more to say in another place, for much is within the reach of the thoughtful, which, with reasonable means, they can get for girls and women, and which yet they do not get; and there are many ways in which also we can so train our girls as to create for them constant and lasting bribes to be in the air.

The question of education is a more difficult one to handle. In childhood I do not see that our wise mother need be anxious; but there comes a day when her girl is entering womanhood, when she will have to think of it. I have dealt with this question so fully of late that I have little here to add.[9] Our public schools are so organized that there is small place or excuse for indulgence, although, under wise management, this has been shown to be possible.[10] But there is a vast and growing cla.s.s which is so situated that the mother can more largely control the studies and hours of her girls than can the parents of those who frequent our munic.i.p.al schools.

[Footnote 9: "Wear and Tear," 6th ed., 1887.]

[Footnote 10: Ibid., p. 54.]

A great change is on her child. Let her watch its evolution, and not with such apparent watchfulness as shall suggest the perils she is to look out for. We are all organized with a certain capital of nerve-force, and we cannot spend it with equal recklessness in all directions. If the girl bears well her gathering work,--that is, as one could wish,--we may let her alone, except that the wise mother will insist on lighter tasks and some rest of body at the time when nature is making her largest claim upon the vital powers. The least sign of physical failure should ring a graver alarm, and make the mother insist, at every cost, upon absence of lessons and reasonable repose. The matter is simple, and I have no more to say.

I am dealing now so entirely with the moral and physical aspects of a woman's life, and so distinctly from the medical point of view, that I do not feel called upon to discuss, in all its aspects, the mooted question of the values and the perils of the higher education. At one time it was not open to women at all. Now it is within her reach. Our girl is well, and has pa.s.sed, happily, over her time of development.

Will the larger education which she so often craves subject her to risks such as are not present to the man,--risks of broken health and of its consequences? I wish to speak with care to the mother called upon to decide this grave question. I most honestly believe that the woman is the better in mind and morals for the larger training, better if she marries, and far better and happier if it chances that she does not. If we take the ma.s.s of girls, even of mature age, and give them the training commonly given to men, they run, I think, grave risks of being injured by it, and in larger proportion than do their brothers. Where it seems for other reasons desirable, it should be, I think, a question of individual selection. The majority of healthy young women ought to be able to bear the strain. Once in a female college, the woman goes on, and it is my own experience that, on the whole, she exhibits a far larger list of disastrous results from such work than do young men. If she be in the least degree nervous or not well, I, for one, should resolutely say no to all such claims; for let us bear in mind that the higher education is rarely to be used as men use it, to some definite end, and is therefore not, on the whole, so essential to her as to him.

Few women mean it as a way towards medicine, or even the upper ranks of teaching; and if they do, the least doubt as to health ought to make us especially unwilling to start an unseaworthy or uninsurable vessel upon an ocean of perilous possibilities. I wish that every woman could attain to the best that men have. I wish for her whatever in the loftiest training helps to make her as mother more capable, as wife more helpful; but I would on no account let the healthiest woman thus task her brain until she is at least nineteen. If she is to marry, and this puts it off until twenty-three, I consider that a gain not counted by the advocates of the higher education. I leave to others to survey the broad question of whether or not it will be well for the community that the ma.s.s of women should have a collegiate training. It is a wide and wrathful question, and has of late been very well discussed in Romanes's paper, and by Mrs. Lynn Linton. I think the conclusions of the former, on the whole, are just; but now, whatever be my views as to the larger interests of the commonwealth and the future mothers of our race, I must not forget that I am giving, or trying to give, what I may call individualized advice, from the physician's view, as to what is wisest.

Let us suppose that circ.u.mstances make it seem proper to consider an ambitious young woman's wish, and to let her go to a college for women.

We presume that she has average health. But let no prudent mother suppose that in these collections of persons of one s.e.x her child will be watched as she has been at home. At no time will she more need the vigilant insight of a mother, and yet this can only be had through letters and in the holiday seasons. Nor can the mother always rely upon the girl to put forward what may cause doubt as to her power to go on with her work. I utterly distrust the statistics of these schools and their graduates as to health, and my want of reliance arises out of the fact that this whole question is in a condition which makes the teachers, scholars, and graduates of such colleges antagonistic to masculine disbelievers in a way and to a degree fatal to truth. I trust far more what I hear from the women who have broken down under the effort to do more than they were fit to do, for always, say what you may, it is the man's standard of endurance which is set before them, and up to which they try to live with all the energy which a woman's higher sense of duty imposes upon the ambitious ones of her s.e.x. I have often asked myself what should be done to make sure that these schools shall produce the minimum amount of evil; what can be done to avoid the penalties inflicted by over-study and cla.s.s compet.i.tions, and by the emotional stimulus which women carry into all forms of work. Even if the doctor says this girl is sound and strong, her early months of college labor should be carefully watched. Above all, her eyes should be seen to, because in my experience some unsuspected disorder of vision has been fruitful of headaches and overstrain of brain, nor is it enough to know that at the beginning her eyes are good. Extreme use often evolves practical evils from visual difficulties at first so slight as to need or seem to need no correction.

The period of examinations is, too, of all others, the time of danger, and I know of many sad breakdowns due to the exaction and emotional anxieties of these days of compet.i.tion and excitement.

Let me once for all admit that many girls improve in health at these colleges, and that in some of them the machinery of organization for care of the mental and physical health of their students seems to be all that is desirable. That it does not work satisfactorily I am sure, from the many cases I have seen of women who have told me their histories of defeat and broken health. The reason is clear. The general feeling (shall I say prejudices?) of such groups of women is bitterly opposed to conceding the belief held by physicians, that there are in the woman's physiological life disqualifications for such continuous labor of mind as is easy and natural to man. The public sentiment of these great schools is against any such creed, and every girl feels called upon to sustain the general view, so that this acts as a constant goad for such as are at times unfit to use their fullest possibility of energy. Modest girls, caught in the stern mechanism of a system, hesitate to admit reasons for lessened work or to exhibit signals of failure, and this I know to be the case. The practical outcome of it all is that the eyes of home can never be too thoughtfully busy with those of their girls who have won consent to pursue, away from maternal care, the higher education of female colleges. I must have wearied that wise mother by this time, but, perhaps, I have given her more than enough to make her dread these trials.

I should say something as to the home-life of girls who go through the ordinary curriculum of city day schools were it not that I have of late so very fully reconsidered and rewritten my views as to this interesting question. I beg to refer my unsatisfied reader to a little book which, I am glad to know, has been helpful to many people in the last few years.[11]

[Footnote 11: "Wear and Tear," pp. 30 to 60. J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1887.]

OUT-DOOR AND CAMP-LIFE FOR WOMEN.

A good many years ago I wrote a short paper, meant to capture popular attention, under the t.i.tle of "Camp Cure." I have reason to think that it was of use, but I have been led to regret that I did not see when it was written that what I therein urged as desirable for men was not also in a measure attainable by many women. I wish now to correct my error of omission, and to show not only that in our climate camp-life in some shape can be readily had, but also what are its joys and what its peculiar advantages.[12] My inclination to write anew on this subject is made stronger by two ill.u.s.trations which recur to my mind, and which show how valuable may be an entire out-door life, and how free from risks even for the invalid. The lessons of the great war were not lost upon some of us, who remember the ease with which recoveries were made in tents, but single cases convince more than any statement of these large and generalized remembrances.

[Footnote 12: "Nurse and Patient," and "Camp Cure," by S. Weir Mitch.e.l.l.

J.B. Lippincott Company Philadelphia.]

I knew a sick and very nervous woman who had failed in many hands to regain health of mind. I had been able to restore to her all she needed in the way of blood and tissue, but she remained, as before, almost helplessly nervous. Wealth made all resources easy, and yet I had been unable to help her. At last I said to her, "If you were a man I think I could cure you." I then told her how in that case I would ask a man to live. "I will do anything you desire," she said, and this was what she did. With an intelligent companion, she secured two well-known, trusty guides, and pitched her camp by the lonely waters of a Western lake in May, as soon as the weather allowed of the venture. With two good wall-tents for sleeping-and sitting-rooms, with a log hut for her men a hundred yards away and connected by a wire telephone, she began to make her experiment.

A little stove warmed her sitting-room at need, and once a fortnight a man went to the nearest town and brought her books. Letters she avoided, and her family agreed to notify her at once of any real occasion for her presence. Even newspapers were shut out, and thus she began her new life. Her men shot birds and deer, and the lake gave her black ba.s.s, and with these and well-chosen canned vegetables and other stores she did well enough as to food. The changing seasons brought her strange varieties of flowers, and she and her friend took industriously to botany, and puzzled out their problems unaided save by books. Very soon rowing, fis.h.i.+ng, and, at last, shooting were added to her resources.

Before August came she could walk for miles with a light gun, and could stand for hours in wait for a deer. Then she learned to swim, and found also refined pleasure in what I call word-sketching, as to which I shall by and by speak. Photography was a further gain, taken up at my suggestion. In a word, she led a man's life until the snow fell in the fall and she came back to report, a thoroughly well woman.

A more notable case was that of a New England lady, who was sentenced to die of consumption by at least two competent physicians. Her husband, himself a doctor, made for her exactly the same effort at relief which was made in the case I have detailed, except that when snow fell he had built a warm log cabin, and actually spent the winter in the woods, teaching her to live out in the air and to walk on snow-shoes. She has survived at least one of her doctors, and is, I believe, to this day a wholesome and vigorous wife and mother.

What large wealth did to help in these two cases may be managed with much smaller means. All through the White Mountains, in summer, you may see people, a whole family often, with a wagon, going from place to place, pitching their tents, eating at farm-houses or hotels, or managing to cook at less cost the food they buy. Our sea-coast presents like chances. With a good tent or two, which costs little, you may go to unoccupied beaches, or by inlet or creek, and live for little. I very often counsel young people to hire a safe open or decked boat, and, with a good tent, to live in the sounds along the Jersey coast, going hither and thither, and camping where it is pleasant, for, with our easy freedom as to land, none object. When once a woman--and I speak now of the healthy--has faced and overcome her dread of sun and mosquitoes, the life becomes delightful. The Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, and the Virginia mountains afford like chances, for which, as these are in a measure remote, there must be a somewhat more costly organization. I knew well a physician who every summer deserted his house and pitched tents on an island not over three miles from home, and there spent the summer with his family, so that there are many ways of doing the same thing.

As to the question of expense, there is no need to say much. All over our spa.r.s.ely-inhabited land places wild enough are within easy reach, and the journey to reach them need not be long. Beyond this, tent-life is, of course, less costly than the hotel or boarding-house, in which such numbers of people swelter through their summers. As to food, it is often needful to be within reach of farm-houses or hotels, and all kind of modifications of the life I advise are possible.

As to inconveniences, they are, of course, many, but, with a little ingenuity, it is easy to make tent-life comfortable, and none need dread them. Any book on camp-life will tell how to meet or avoid them, and to such treatises I beg to refer the reader who wishes to experiment on this delightful mode of gypsying.

The cla.s.s of persons who find it easy to reach the most charming sites and to secure the help of competent guides is, as I have said in another place, increasing rapidly. The desire also for such a life is also healthfully growing, so that this peculiarly American mode of getting an outing is becoming more and more familiar. It leads to our young folks indulging in all sorts of strengthening pursuits. It takes them away from less profitable places, and the good it does need not be confined to the boys. Young women may swim, fish, and row like their brothers, but the life has gains and possibilities, as to which I would like to say something more. In a well-ordered camp you may be sure of good food and fair cooking. To sleep and live in the air is an insurance against what we call taking cold. Where nature makes the atmospheric changes, they are always more gradual and kindly than those we make at any season when we go from street to house or house to street.

My brothers during the war always got colds when at home on leave, and those who sleep in a c.h.i.n.ky cabin or tent soon find that they do not suffer and that they have an increasing desire for air and openness.

To live out of doors seems to be a little matter in the way of change, and that it should have remarkable moral and intellectual values does not appear credible to such as have not had this experience.

Yet, in fact, nothing so dismisses the host of little nervousnesses with which house-caged women suffer as this free life. Cares, frets, worries, and social annoyances disappear, and in the woods and by the waters we lose, as if they were charmed away, our dislikes or jealousies, all the base, little results of the struggle for bread or place. At home, in cities, they seem so large; here, in the gentle company of constant sky and lake and stream, they seem trivial, and we cast them away as easily as we throw aside some piece of worn-out and useless raiment.

The man who lives out of doors awhile acquires better sense of moral proportions, and thinks patiently and not under stress, making tranquil companions of his worthy thoughts. This is a great thing, not to be hurried. There seems to me always more time out of doors than in houses, and if you have intellectual problems to settle, the cool quiet of the woods or the lounging comfort of the canoe, or to be out under "the huge and thoughtful night," has many times seemed to me helpful. One gets near realities out of doors. Thought is more sober; one becomes a better friend to one's self.

As to the effect of out-door life on the imaginative side of us, much may be said. Certainly some books get fresh flavors out of doors, and you see men or women greedily turn to reading and talking over verse who never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt Whitman and Th.o.r.eau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A good many of them--read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump in the woods--shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to you to have gotten their nature-lessons through plate-gla.s.s windows. The test is a sharp one, and will leave out some great names and let in some hardly known, or almost forgotten. Books to be read out of doors would make a curious catalogue, and would vary, as such lists must, with every thoughtful reader, while some would smile, perhaps with reason, at the idea of any such cla.s.sification. Certainly all would name Wordsworth, and a few would add Clough, whilst the out-door plays of Shakespeare would come in, and we should soon be called on to feel that for this sort of congenial open-air poetic company we have still to fall back on the vast resources of English verse. Somehow, as yet, our own poets have not gotten fully into imaginative relation with what is peculiar in our own flowers, trees, and skies. This does not lessen our joy in the masters of English verse, because, of course, much of what they have sung has liberal application in all lands; yet is there something which we lose in them for lack of familiar knowledge of English lanes and woods, of English flowers and trees. A book of the essentially American nature--poems found here and there in many volumes--would be pleasant, for surely we have had no one poet as to whom it is felt that he is absolutely desirable as the interpretive poetic observer who has positive claims to go with us as a friendly bookmate in our wood or water wanderings. I have shrunk, as will have been seen, from the dangerous venture of enlarging my brief catalogue. What I have just now spoken of as one's bookmates will appear in very different lights according to the surroundings in which we seek to enjoy their society.

If, as to this matter, any one doubts me, and has the good luck to camp out long, and to have a variety of books of verse and prose, very soon, if dainty of taste, he will find that the artificial flavoring of some books is unpleasantly felt; but, after all, one does not read very much when living thus outside of houses. Books are then, of course, well to have, but rather as giving one texts for thoughts and talk than as preachers, counsellors, jesters, or friends.

In my own wood-life or canoe journeys I used to wonder how little I read or cared to read. One has nowadays many resources. If you sketch, no matter how badly, it teaches and even exacts that close observation of nature which brings in its train much that is to be desired. Photography is a means of record, now so cheaply available as to be at the disposal of all, and there is a great charm of a winter evening in turning over sketch or photograph to recall anew the pleasant summer days. Beyond all this, there is botany. I knew a lady who combined it happily and ingeniously with photography, and so preserved pictures of plants in their flowering state. When you are out under starry skies with breadth of heaven in view, astronomy with an opera-gla.s.s--and Galileo's telescope was no better--is an agreeable temptation which the cheap and neat charts of the skies now to be readily obtained make very interesting.

I should advise any young woman, indeed, any one who has the good chance to live a camp-life, or to be much in the country, to keep a diary, not of events but of things. I find myself that I go back to my old note-books with increasing pleasure.

To make this resource available something more than the will to do it is necessary. Take any nice young girl, who is reasonably educated, afloat in your canoe with you, and ask her what she sees. As a rule she has a general sense that yonder yellow bank, tree-crowned above the rippled water, is pleasant. The sky is blue, the sun falling behind you. She says it is beautiful and has a vague sense of enjoyment, and will carry away with her little more than this. Point out to her that the trees above are some of them deciduous poplars, or maples, and others sombre groups of pines and silky tamarack with a wonder of delicate tracery.

Show her that the sun against the sloped yellow bank has covered the water with a s.h.i.+ning changeful orange light, through which gleam the mottled stones below, and that the concave curve of every wave which faces us concentrates for the eye an unearthly sapphire the reflex of the darkening blue above us. Or a storm is on us at the same place. She is fearless as to the ducking from which even her waterproof will hardly protect. The clouds gather, the mists trail on the hills, ragged mosses on the trees hang in wet festoons of gray, and look in the misty distance like numberless cascades. It rains at last, a solid down-pour; certain tree-trunks grow black, and the s.h.i.+ning beech and birch and poplar get a more vivid silver on their wet boles. The water is black like ink. It is no longer even translucent, and overhead the red scourges of the lightning fly, and the great thunder-roar of smitten clouds rolls over us from hill to hill.

All these details you teach her and more, and paddle home with a mental cargo of fresh joys and delicious memories. My young friend is intelligent and clever, but she has never learned to observe. If she wants to know how, there is a book will help her. Let her take with her Ruskin's "Modern Painters." It will teach her much, not all. Nor do I know of any other volume which will tell her more.[13] Despite its faults, it has so many lessons in the modes of minute study of outside nature that it becomes a valuable friend. Although ostensibly written to aid artistic criticism, it does far more than this and yet not all.

Other books which might seem desirable are less so because they are still more distinctly meant to teach or a.s.sist artists or amateurs. What is yet wanted is a little treatise on the methods of observing exterior nature. Above all it should be adapted to our own woods, skies, and waters. What to look for as a matter of pleasure, and how to see and record it, is a thing apart from such observation as leads to cla.s.sification, and is scientific in its aims. It is somewhat remote also from the artist's study, which is a more complex business, and tends to learn what can be rendered by pencil or brush and what cannot.

Its object at first is merely to give intelligent joy to the senses, to cultivate them into acuteness, and to impress on the mind such records as they ought to give us at their best.

[Footnote 13: "Frondes Agrestes," Ruskin, is a more handy book than "Modern Painters," but is only selections from the greater volumes recommended. "Deucalion" is yet harder reading, but will repay the careful reader.]

Presuming the pupil to be like myself, powerless to use the pencil, she is to learn how to put on paper in words what she sees. The result will be what I may call _word-sketches_. Observe these are not to be for other eyes. They make her diary of things seen and worthy of note.

Neither are they to be efforts to give elaborate descriptions. In the hands of a master, such use of words makes a picture in which often he sacrifices something, as the artist does, to get something else, and strives chiefly to leave on the mind one dominant emotion just as did the scene thus portrayed. A few words may do this or it may be an elaborate work. The gift is a rare and great one. The word-paintings of Ruskin hang forever in one's mental gallery, strong, true, poetical, and capable of stirring you as the scenes described would have done, nay, even more, for a great word-master has stood interpretative between you and nature.

Miss Bronte was mistress of this art. Blackmore has it also. In some writers it is so lightly managed as to approach the sketch, and is more suggestive than fully descriptive. To see what I mean read the first few chapters of "Miss Angel," by Anna Thackeray. But a sketch by a trained and poetical observer is one thing; a sketch by a less gifted person is quite another. My pupil must be content with the simplest, most honest, unadorned record of things seen. Her training must look to this only.

What she should first seek to do is to be methodical and accurate and by and by fuller. If wise she will first limit herself to small scenes, and try to get notes of them somewhat in this fas.h.i.+on. She is, we suppose, on the bank of a stream. Her notes run as follows: