t a Dryad who's fallen out of
the branches. What are you doing away up here anyway? I guess you startled
me almost as much as I seem to have startled you. I'm mighty sorry I
scared you though!"

His apology made Vivian remember her own, and though she quite forgot her
speech and just stammered out how sorry she was, the ranger liked it quite
as well and assured her he should never think of it again.

"And now," he said, "since you've come away off up here, I'm not going to
let you go home until you've seen my garden."

"Your garden?" queried Vivian. "Why, your cabin isn't here! It's----"

"I know," he interrupted, "but my garden is. Follow me. I'll show you. I
promise there aren't any bears."

She followed him for half a mile up the trail. They wound around great
bowlders and along the edges of steep, forbidding places. Then the ranger
paused before a thicket of yellow quaking-asps.

"This is the entrance," he explained. "Now prepare, for you're going to
see something more wonderful than the hanging gardens of Nineveh."

Pushing aside the quaking-asps, he made a path for Vivian, who followed,
mystified. A few moments more and they had passed the portals, and stood
in the ranger's garden.

Vivian caught her breath. Never in her life had she seen such grandeur of
color. They stood in an open place--a tiny valley surrounded by brown
foot-hills. Beyond, the higher pine-clad mountains shut off the valley
from the eyes of all who did not seek it. Some great, gray, over-hanging
rocks guarded the farther entrance. Within the inclosure, carpeting the
valley and clothing the foot-hills, great masses of color glowed in the
gold of the sunlight. The ranger's garden was a flaming pageant of yellow
and bronze and orange, crimson and scarlet and purple between a cloudless,
turquoise sky.

"Oh!" cried Vivian. "It's just like a secret, isn't it, hidden away up
here? I never saw such color in all my life, except in Thais, you know,
where the women in Alexandria wore such beautiful gowns." Somehow she knew
that the Cinnamon Creek forest ranger _did_ know.

"Yes," he said understandingly, "I remember, only this is better than
grand opera, because it's real. You see, I spotted this place last spring.
I saw all the different shrubs--quaking-asp and buck-brush and Oregon
grape and service-berry and hawthorn and wild currant--and I thought to
myself that this would be some garden in September. It's cold nights up
here in these hills