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-glass--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 shining 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 shining 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.