Explore "Dick's Desertion" by Marjorie Pickthall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In after life Dick never forgot those weeks of wandering. The freedom / and beauty of all that summer world was indelibly impressed upon his / memory. His was a nature readily moved to admiration, and had powers / of observation unusual in a lad of his age. But there were two small / scenes, each perfect in pictorial beauty, which he afterwards / recollected with special clearness.
They were tramping steadily along the bottom of a small ravine, one / late July afternoon, through a luxuriance of fern and vine almost / tropical. Dick, watching the dark woods ahead, saw a sudden little / flame of colour leap to life against the black stems of the pines -- a / flame so intense in its ruddy gold that it seemed to throb and pulsate / like a tongue of fire. A sunbeam, slanting through the branches, had / been caught and held in the cup of an open red lily -- that was all. But / the effect was one which no artist on earth could have reproduced.