And to this she directed my attention.
"You see those marks?" she said. "We call them the Seven Sisters. Follow a
little lower with your eye, and you will see a fold of the hill, the tops
of some trees, and a tail of smoke out of the midst of them. That is
Swanston cottage, where my brother and I are living."
--Stevenson: _St. Ives_.
(Copyright, 1897. Charles Scribner's Sons.)
Notice in the selection below that for objects _near at hand_ details so
small as the lizard's eye are given, but that these details are not given,
when we are asked to observe things far away.
Slow though their march had been, by this time _they had come to the end
of the avenue, and were in the wide circular sweep before the castle._
They stopped here and stood looking off over the garden, with its somber
cypresses and bright beds of geranium, down upon the valley, dim and
luminous in a mist of gold. Great, heavy, fantastic-shaped clouds,
pearl-white with pearl-gray shadows, piled themselves up against the
scintillant dark blue of the sky. In and out among the rose trees _near at
hand_, where the sun was hottest, heavily flew, with a loud bourdonnement,
the cockchafers promised by Annunziata,--big, blundering, clumsy, the
scorn of their light-winged and businesslike competitors, the bees.
Lizards lay immobile as lizards cast in bronze, only their little
glittering, watchful pin heads of eyes giving sign of life. And of course
the blackcaps never for a moment left off singing.
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