d soon comes the iris, with its broad
golden eye fringed with rays of lavender blue; and five
varieties of phacelia overwhelm some places with waves of
purple, blue, indigo, and whitish pink. The evening primrose
covers the lower slopes with long sheets of brightest yellow,
and from the hills above the rock-rose adds its golden bloom to
that of the sorrel and the wild alfalfa, until the hills almost
outshine the bright light from the slopes and plains. And
through all this nods a tulip of most delicate lavender;
vetches, lupins, and all the members of the wild-pea family are
pushing and winding their way everywhere in every shade of
crimson, purple, and white; along the ground crowfoot weaves a
mantle of white, through which, amid a thousand comrades, the
orthocarpus rears its tufted head of pink. Among all these are
mixed a thousand other flowers, plenty enough as plenty would
be accounted in other countries, but here mere pin-points on a
great map of colors.

As the stranger gazes upon this carpet that now covers hill and
dale, undulates over the table-lands, and robes even the
mountain with a brilliancy and breadth of color that strikes
the eye from miles away, he exhausts his vocabulary of
superlatives, and goes away imagining he has seen it all. Yet
he has seen only the background of an embroidery more varied,
more curious and splendid, than the carpet upon which it is
wrought. Asters bright with centre of gold and lavender rays
soon shine high above the iris, and a new and larger tulip of
deepest yellow nods where its lavender cousin is drooping its
lately proud head. New bell-flowers of white and blue and
indigo rise above the first, which served merely as ushers to
the display, and whole acres ablaze with the orange of the
poppy are fast turning with the indigo of the larkspur. Where
the ground was lately aglow with the marigold and the
four-o'clock the tall penstemon now reaches out a hundred arms
full-hung with trumpets of purple and pink. Here the silene
rears high its head with fringed corolla of scarlet; and there
the wild gooseberry dazzles the eye with a perfect shower of
tubular flowers of the same bright color. The mimulus alone is
almost enough to color the hills. Half a dozen varieties, some
with long, narrow, tr