decked with flowers, mostly compositae and purple leguminosae, a hundred
corollas or more to the square yard, with a corresponding abundance of
winged blossoms above them, moths and butterflies, the leguminosae
of the insect kingdom. This floweriness is maintained with delightful
variety all the way up through rocks and bushes to the snow--violets,
lilies, gilias, oenotheras, wallflowers, ivesias, saxifrages, smilax,
and miles of blooming bushes, chiefly azalea, honeysuckle, brier rose,
buckthorn, and eriogonum, all meeting and blending in divine accord.

Two liliaceous plants in particular, Erythronium grandiflorum and
Fritillaria pudica, are marvelously beautiful and abundant. Never
before, in all my walks, have I met so glorious a throng of these fine
showy liliaceous plants. The whole mountainside was aglow with them,
from a height of fifty-five hundred feet to the very edge of the snow.
Although remarkably fragile, both in form and in substance, they are
endowed with plenty of deep-seated vitality, enabling them to grow in
all kinds of places--down in leafy glens, in the lee of wind-beaten
ledges, and beneath the brushy tangles of azalea, and oak, and prickly
roses--everywhere forming the crowning glory of the flowers. If the
neighboring mountains are as rich in lilies, then this may well be
called the Lily Range.

After climbing about a thousand feet above the plain I came to a
picturesque mass of rock, cropping up through the underbrush on one of
the steepest slopes of the mountain. After examining some tufts of grass
and saxifrage that were growing in its fissured surface, I was going
to pass it by on the upper side, where the bushes were more open, but a
company composed of the two lilies I have mentioned were blooming on the
lower side, and though they were as yet out of sight, I suddenly changed
my mind and went down to meet them, as if attracted by the ringing of
their bells. They were growing in a small, nestlike opening between the
rock and the bushes, and both the erythronium and the fritillaria were
in full flower. These were the first of the species I had seen, and
I need not try to tell the joy they made. They are both lowly
plants,--lowly as violets,--the tallest seldom exceeding six inches in
height, so that the most searching winds that sweep the mountains scarce
reach low enough to shake their bells.

The fritillaria has five or six linear, obtuse leaves, put on
irregularly near the bottom of t