all the wood is still, the crepitatious rustle of the
unfolding leaves and the pushing flower-stalk within, that has open
blossoms before it has fairly uncramped from the sheath. It commends
itself by a certain exclusiveness of growth, taking enough room and
never elbowing; for if the flora of the lake region has a fault it is
that there is too much of it. We have more than three hundred species
from Kearsarge Canon alone, and if that does not include them all it is
because they were already collected otherwhere.

One expects to find lakes down to about nine thousand feet, leading into
each other by comparatively open ripple slopes and white cascades. Below
the lakes are filled basins that are still spongy swamps, or substantial
meadows, as they get down and down.

Here begin the stream tangles. On the east slopes of the middle Sierras
the pines, all but an occasional yellow variety, desert the stream
borders about the level of the lowest lakes, and the birches and
tree-willows begin. The firs hold on almost to the mesa levels,--there
are no foothills on this eastern slope,--and whoever has firs misses
nothing else. It goes without saying that a tree that can afford to take
fifty years to its first fruiting will repay acquaintance. It keeps,
too, all that half century, a virginal grace of outline, but having once
flowered, begins quietly to put away the things of its youth. Years by
year the lower rounds of boughs are shed, leaving no scar; year by year
the star-branched minarets approach the sky. A fir-tree loves a water
border, loves a long wind in a draughty canon, loves to spend itself
secretly on the inner finishings of its burnished, shapely cones. Broken
open in mid-season the petal-shaped scales show a crimson satin surface,
perfect as a rose.

The birch--the brown-bark western birch characteristic of lower stream
tangles--is a spoil sport. It grows thickly to choke the stream that
feeds it; grudges it the sky and space for angler's rod and fly. The
willows do better; painted-cup, cypripedium, and the hollow stalks
of span-broad white umbels, find a footing among their stems. But in
general the steep plunges, the white swirls, green and tawny pools, the
gliding hush of waters between the meadows and the mesas afford little
fishing and few flowers.

One looks for these to begin again when once free of the rifted canon
walls; the high note of babble and laughter falls off to the steadier
mellow tone of a strea