ip in meadow corners and died from eating it, and so learned to
produce death swiftly and at will. But how did they learn, repenting in
the last agony, that animal fat is the best antidote for its virulence;
and who taught them that the essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis),
which looks to have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in
stomachic disorders. But they so understand and so use. One believes
it to be a sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a complexer
civilization. I remember very well when I came first upon a wet meadow
of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or use. It looked potent; the
cool, shiny leaves, the succulent, pink stems and fruity bloom. A little
touch, a hint, a word, and I should have known what use to put them to.
So I felt, unwilling to leave it until we had come to an understanding.
So a musician might have felt in the presence of an instrument known to
be within his province, but beyond his power. It was with the relieved
sense of having shaped a long surmise that I watched the Senora Romero
make a poultice of it for my burned hand.

On, down from the lower lakes to the village weirs, the brown and golden
disks of helenum have beauty as a sufficient excuse for being. The
plants anchor out on tiny capes, or mid-stream islets, with the nearly
sessile radicle leaves submerged. The flowers keep up a constant
trepidation in time with the hasty water beating at their stems,
a quivering, instinct with life, that seems always at the point of
breaking into flight; just as the babble of the watercourses always
approaches articulation but never quite achieves it. Although of wide
range the helenum never makes itself common through profusion, and may
be looked for in the same places from year to year. Another lake
dweller that comes down to the ploughed lands is the red columbine. (
C.truncata). It requires no encouragement other than shade, but grows
too rank in the summer heats and loses its wildwood grace. A common
enough orchid in these parts is the false lady's slipper (Epipactis
gigantea), one that springs up by any water where there is sufficient
growth of other sorts to give it countenance. It seems to thrive best in
an atmosphere of suffocation.

The middle Sierras fall off abruptly eastward toward the high valleys.
Peaks of the fourteen thousand class, belted with sombre swathes
of pine, rise almost directly from the bench lands with no foothill
approaches. At the lower edge of th