"I know Aunty will be delighted with it," cried Della, much pleased.
"She likes all plants, but especially things that are a little bit
different. That's why she spends so much time selecting her wall
vases--so that they shall be unlike other people's."

"Fitz-James's woods," as they already called the bit of forest that
Dorothy hoped to have possession of, extended back from the road and
spread until it joined Grandfather Emerson's woods on one side and what
was called by the Rosemonters "the West Woods" on the other. The girls
walked home by a path that took them into Rosemont not far from the
station where Della was to take the train.

"Until you notice what there really is in the woods in winter you think
there isn't anything worth looking at," said Ethel Blue, walking along
with her eyes in the tree crowns.

"The shapes of the different trees are as distinct now as they are in
summer," declared Ethel Brown. "You'd know that one was an oak, and the
one next to it a beech, wouldn't you?"

"I don't know whether I would or not," confessed Dorothy honestly, "but
I can almost always tell a tree by its bark."

"I can tell a chestnut by its bark nowadays," asserted Ethel Blue,
"because it hasn't any!"

"What on earth do you mean?" inquired city-bred Della.

"Something or other has killed all the chestnuts in this part of the
world in the last two or three years. Don't you see all these dead trees