the vase day after day.

Remarkable are the places in which the flowers are found. Not only are
they seen in crevices all the way up the straight side of rocks, where
one would hardly think a seed could lodge, but beside the roads, between
the horses' tracks, and on the edge of gutters in the streets of a city.
One can walk down any street in Colorado Springs and gather a bouquet,
lovely and fragrant, choice enough to adorn any one's table. I once
counted twelve varieties in crossing one vacant corner lot on the
principal street.

One of the richest wild gardens I know is a bare, open spot in a
cottonwood grove, part of it tunneled by ants, which run over it by
millions, and the rest a jumble of bowlders and wild rosebushes,
impossible to describe. In this spot, unshaded from the burning sun,
flourish flowers innumerable. Rosebushes, towering far above one's head,
loaded with bloom; shrubs of several kinds, equally burdened by delicate
white or pink blossoms; the ground covered with foot-high pentstemons,
blue and lavender, in which the buds fairly get in each other's way; and
a curious plant--primrose, I believe--which opens every morning, a few
inches from the ground, a large white blossom like the magnolia, turns
it deep pink, and closes it before night; several kinds of yellow
flowers; wild geraniums, with a look of home in their daintily penciled
petals; above all, the wonderful golden columbine. I despair of
picturing this grand flower to eyes accustomed to the insignificant
columbine of the East. The blossom is three times the size of its
Eastern namesake, growing in clumps sometimes three feet across, with
thirty or forty stems of flowers standing two and a half feet high. In
hue it is a delicate straw color, sometimes all one tint, sometimes with
outside petals of snowy white, and rarely with those outsiders of
lavender. It is a red-letter day when the flower-lover comes upon a
clump of the lavender-leaved columbine. Far up in the mountains is found
still another variety of this beautiful flower, with outside petals of a
rich blue. This, I believe, is the State flower of Colorado.

I am surprised at the small number of flowers here with which I am
familiar. I think there are not more than half a dozen in all this
extraordinary "procession of flowers" that I ever saw before. In
consequence, every day promises discoveries, every walk is exciting as
an excursion into unknown lands, each new find is a fresh treas