.

"Might be a million miles from anywhere," Daylight whispered to himself.

But ever his gaze returned to the wonderful lily beside the bubbling
spring.

He tethered the horse and wandered on foot among the knolls. Their tops
were crowned with century-old spruce trees, and their sides clothed
with oaks and madronos and native holly. But to the perfect redwoods
belonged the small but deep canon that threaded its way among the
knolls. Here he found no passage out for his horse, and he returned to
the lily beside the spring. On foot, tripping, stumbling, leading the
animal, he forced his way up the hillside. And ever the ferns carpeted
the way of his feet, ever the forest climbed with him and arched
overhead, and ever the clean joy and sweetness stole in upon his senses.

On the crest he came through an amazing thicket of velvet-trunked young
madronos, and emerged on an open hillside that led down into a tiny
valley. The sunshine was at first dazzling in its brightness, and he
paused and rested, for he was panting from the exertion. Not of old
had he known shortness of breath such as this, and muscles that so
easily tired at a stiff climb. A tiny stream ran down the tiny valley
through a tiny meadow that was carpeted knee-high with grass and blue
and white nemophila. The hillside was covered with Mariposa lilies and
wild hyacinth, down through which his horse dropped slowly, with
circumspect feet and reluctant gait.

Crossing the stream, Daylight followed a faint cattle trail over a low,
rocky hill and through a wine-wooded forest of manzanita, and emerged
upon another tiny valley, down which filtered another spring-fed,
meadow-bordered streamlet. A jack-rabbit bounded from a bush under his
horse's nose, leaped the stream, and vanished up the opposite hillside
of scrub-oak. Daylight watched it admiringly as he rode on to the head
of the meadow. Here he startled up a many-pronged buck, that seemed to
soar across the meadow, and to soar over the stake-and-rider fence,
and, still soaring, disappeared in a friendly copse beyond.

Daylight's delight was unbounded. It seemed to him that he had never
been so happy. His old woods' training was aroused, and he was keenly
interested in everything in the moss on the trees and branches; in the
bunches of mistletoe hanging in the oaks; in the nest of a wood-rat; in
the water-cress growing in the sheltered eddies of the little stream;
in the butterflies drifting thro