and, to such as lack technical knowledge
of botany, imposing respect rather by sonorous appeal to the ear than by
visual suggestion to the memory. That herbs should be marshalled in so
impressive an array fills one with admiration and with somewhat of awe
for these representatives of the vegetable kingdom. As Muir pronounces
their full-sounding titles, one feels that each is a noble in this
distinguished company. No one unprotected by a botany should have the
temerity to enter, amid these lists, alone.

We visited this country in the season of flowers. Whole hillsides of
chamisal ("chamiz" or greasewood) bore their delicate, spirea-like,
cream-colored blossoms--when seen at a distance, like a hovering breath,
as unsubstantial as dew, or as the well-named bloom on a plum or black
Hamburg grape. The superb yucca flaunted its glorious white standards,
borne proudly aloft like those of the Roman legions, each twelve or
fifteen feet in height, supporting myriads of white bells. The Mexicans
call this the "Quixote"--a noble and fitting tribute to the knight of La
Mancha. The tender center of the plant, loved as food equally by man and
beast, is protected by many bristling bayonets, an ever-vigilant guard.
At an altitude of seven thousand or eight thousand feet, one passed
through acres of buckthorn, honey-fragrant, this also a favorite of the
deer, now visited by every bee and butterfly of the mountain side. It is
to be noted that as one ascends the mountains the butterflies increase
in numbers as well as the flowers which they so closely resemble, save
only the latter's stationary estate.

One sees in its perfection of color the "Indian paint brush," with its
red of purest dye, and adjoining it solid fields of blue lupine--the
colors of Harvard and Yale, side by side, challenging birds and all
creatures of the air to a decision as to which of them bears itself the
more bravely. Here is a chestnut tree; but look not overhead for its
sheltering branches. This is a country of surprises, and if the alder
tree towers on high, the dwarf chestnut or chinkapin here delegates to
the mountains the pains of struggling toward the heavens, and, contented
with its lowly estate, freely offers to the various "small deer" of the
forest its horde of sweet, three-cornered nuts.

Under the pines one catches a distant gleam of the snow plant, an
exquisite sharp note of color, of true Roman shade, such as Rossetti
loved to introduce into his pi