Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/82

LANDSCAPE PAINTING My reply to this was to pin a card to one of the oak's lower branches and ask my friend, standing at ten paces, to tell me how many of the leaves he could count without shifting his gaze from the white card. "Well, by Jove!" he presently exclaimed, "I can't count up to fifty." "What do the rest of the leaves look like," I asked, "a more or less indefinite blur?"

"Yes! Just a blur." "Well," I said, "now you understand just a little of the meaning of the word refraction."

But the new knowledge did not seem to console him. He continued to regret the loss of all those leaves. I could not convince him that it would have been a disaster had he been obliged to see each individual leaf of all the millions which the tree doubtless carried, and in [52]