24 



HOME AND GAKDEN 



reminds me of a distant sea washing upon a shingly- 

 beach. 



The sun is away on my front and left, and the 

 sharp shadows of the trees are thrown diagonally 

 across the path, where the sunlight comes through a 

 half-open place. Farther along, for some fifty yards 

 or more, the path is in shade, with still more distant 

 stretches of stem-barred glints of sunny space. Here 

 the fir-trunks tell dark against the mist-coloured back- 

 ground. It is not mist, for the day is quite clear, but 

 I am on high ground, and the distance is of the tops 

 of firs where the hillside falls steeply away to the 

 north. Where the sun catches the edges of the nearer 

 trunks it lights them in a sharp line, leaving the rest 

 warmly dark ; but where the trees stand in shade the 

 trunks are of a cool grey that is almost blue, borrow- 

 ing their colour, through the opening of the track be- 

 hind me, from the hard blue cloudless sky. The trunks 

 seen quite against the sunlight look a pale greenish- 

 brown, lighter than the shadow they cast, and some- 

 what warmed by the sunlit dead bracken at their 

 feet. When I move onward into the shade the blue 

 look on the stems is gone, and I only see their true 

 colour of warm purplish-grey, clouded Avith paler grey 

 lichen. I wish I had with me some young student of 

 painting, the varying colourings of the trees in this 

 wood in to-day's light offer such valuable lessons in 

 training the eye to see the colour of objects as it 

 appears to be ; the untrained eye only sees colour as 



