7. Describe a busy street scene: first, from a window overlooking the street; second, as you pass down the street with a crowd.

8. Take some favorite walk, and describe what you see on your way.

9. Describe orally your railroad station as you would to a stranger, giving him only such details as would enable him to recognize the building.

10. Describe the scene pictured on page 252. Remember to give your general impression or image first.

11. Write a descriptive paragraph, using one of the following subjects:

(a) A shop.

(b) A canal boat.

(c) A camp located on a lake.

(d) Some building which has impressed you as peculiar in structure.

(e) A quarry.

12. Describe a library or dining-room, lighted and occupied, as seen from the street.

13. Your dog has been stolen. Describe him carefully for the police officer.

14. Select from your reading the description which presents to you the most vivid picture.

15. Find five examples of good descriptions in your history reading.

16. Describe the scenes in the pictures on (a) page 212; (b) page 237.

303. Time in Description. To many descriptions a point of time is as essential as a point of view. A description is made vivid by putting it at a particular season, at a special time of day, and sometimes even on a definite day. The impression obtained from a landscape may be quite different at one season of the year from what it is at another. Just as the season and the weather affect our feelings, so they affect our impressions of things about us. So if you would make your descriptions vivid, fix the time as definitely as you do the point of view, and inform your reader of any change in time as carefully as you would inform him of a change of view.

Note the effect of fixing the time in the following description:

It was high noon, and the rays of the sun, that hung poised directly overhead in an intolerable white glory, fell straight as plummets upon the roofs and streets of G. The adobe walls and sparse brick sidewalks of the drowsing town radiated the heat in an oily, quivering shimmer. The leaves of the eucalyptus trees around the Plaza drooped motionless, limp and relaxed under the scorching, searching blaze. The shadows of these trees had shrunk to their smallest circumference, contracting close about the trunks. The shade had dwindled to the breadth of a mere line. The sun was everywhere. The heat exhaling

from brick and plaster and metal met the heat that steadily descended blanketwise and smothering, from the pale, scorched sky. NORRIS: The Octopus.

It was a rainy Sunday in the gloomy month of November. I had been detained, in the course of a journey, by a slight indisposition, from which I was recovering; but was still feverish, and obliged to keep within doors all day, in an inn of the small town of Derby. A wet Sunday in a country inn! whoever has had the luck to experience one can alone judge of my. situation. The rain pattered against the casements; the bells tolled for church with a melancholy sound. I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world than a stableyard on a rainy day. The place was littered with wet straw that had been kicked about by travellers and stable-boys. In one corner was a stagnant pool of water, surrounding an island of muck; there were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable, crest-fallen cock, drenched out of all life and spirit; his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back; near the cart was a half-dozing cow, chewing her cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapor rising from her reeking hide; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by, uttered something every now and then, between a bark and a yelp; a drab of a kitten tramped backwards and forwards through the yard in pattens looking as sulky as the weather itself; everything in short was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hardened ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

WASHINGTON IRVING: Bracebridge Hall.

I stood on the bridge at midnight,

As the clocks were striking the hour,
And the moon rose o'er the city,
Behind the dark church-tower.

I saw her bright reflection
In the waters under me,
Like a golden goblet falling
And sinking into the sea.

And far in the hazy distance
Of that lovely night in June,
The blaze of the flaming furnace
Gleamed redder than the moon.

LONGFELLOW: The Bridge.

304. Comparison and Contrast. One means by which the reader can be helped to form quickly a clear image of an object is by comparing and contrasting it with something he already knows. If the comparison is striking, he will immediately picture the object in its general outline. To say that a house has an L, that an object is dome-shaped or built on a curve, that a color is sky blue or grass green, is to picture something which would require many words to express.

In describing persons, too, contrast and comparison are particularly useful and effective. We say, for instance, that the person whom we are describing is about as tall as M- but more slender and more erect; that he has the same general type of features, but — then we proceed to point out those details which are in contrast.