KASUYA] NATURE WORK AT ALOHA CLUB 199 



"Do you know all the flowers hereabouts?" This was a gentle 

 hint from Miss Shearer, and almost all the camp were out on the 

 road down the hill, eagerly learning the names of the beauties. 

 When you see pretty dolls, you have a vague sense of pleasure. 

 But when you make a step forward, and find their names, you feel 

 as if those dolls were partly in your possession. So it was with us, 

 with flowers. We had liked flowers but we had not cared for wild 

 ones. But now, when we looked at each one of them carefully and 

 found a sweet and interesting name attached to it, such as jewel- 

 weed or Jack-in-the- Pulpit, we could not but cherish it with fondest 

 afl^ection. Twenty -five was the number of flowers which we had 

 to identify in order to get a cross on the chart, but how could we 

 stop there? There were hundreds of them waiting for our visit. 

 And it is not strange that Miss Shearer was besieged by girls with 

 some unknown flowers and thousands of questions about them. 



Then came a bird-walk. At dawn, when the delicate pink in the 

 east, peeping from the purple mist, was gently waking up Lake 

 Catherine, and when the mountains were still in deep slimiber, 

 wrapt in dreamy haze, we were up walking, — no, not walking, for 

 we put one step after another as softly as we could. All was quiet, 

 and we never felt ourselves so calm and so full of sweet sensations. 

 From far, a long silvery note with an exquisite tremor broke this 

 blessed quiet. **A white-throat sparrow," somebody whispered. 

 Then, as the day broke and the trees gradually emerged from 

 thick purplish gray vapor, a heavenly chorus of little birds began 

 to fill the balmy air. We listened and we learned how to dis- 

 tinguish one note from another, and thus each tree inhabitant, of 

 the Catherine Shore was fixed in our minds with its characteristic 

 note. 



The Plant Association. That was one of the most charming 

 subjects of study. This sounds quite solid and scientific, but it is 

 nothing but a pleasant trip around and on the lake to see which 

 flowers have what kind of neighbors, which plants are very fond 

 of water by place and so forth. Thus when the trip was made, 

 even the most inconspicuous liverworts were visited and their 

 tiny spore cups were admired just as much as butter-cups. 



Our nature walk was not limited to the knowledge of flowers, 

 ferns and birds, but by and by our aspiration went high up into 

 heaven, and finally the little twinkling stars became the sources 

 of inspiration. One evening we all lay down on the soft grass, and 



