hered horn cases. We hoped it was not too far
out of the running of night prowlers to have put a speedy end to the
long agony, but we could not be sure. I never liked the spit of Windy
Lake again. It seems that all snow nourished plants count nothing so
excellent in their kind as to be forehanded with their bloom, working
secretly to that end under the high piled winters. The heathers begin by
the lake borders, while little sodden drifts still shelter under their
branches. I have seen the tiniest of them (_Kalmia glauca_) blooming,
and with well-formed fruit, a foot away from a snowbank from which it
could hardly have emerged within a week. Somehow the soul of the heather
has entered into the blood of the English-speaking.

"And oh! is that heather?" they say; and the most indifferent ends by
picking a sprig of it in a hushed, wondering way. One must suppose that
the root of their respective races issued from the glacial borders at
about the same epoch, and remember their origin.

Among the pines where the slope of the land allows it, the streams run
into smooth, brown, trout-abounding rills across open flats that are in
reality filled lake basins. These are the displaying grounds of the
gentians--blue--blue--eye-blue, perhaps, virtuous and likable flowers.
One is not surprised to learn that they have tonic properties. But if
your meadow should be outside the forest reserve, and the sheep have
been there, you will find little but the shorter, paler _G. Newberryii_,
and in the matted sods of the little tongues of greenness that lick up
among the pines along the watercourses, white, scentless, nearly
stemless, alpine violets.

At about the nine thousand foot level and in the summer there will be
hosts of rosy-winged dodecatheon, called shooting-stars, outlining the
crystal runnels in the sod. Single flowers have often a two-inch spread
of petal, and the full, twelve blossomed heads above the slender
pedicels have the airy effect of wings.

It is about this level one looks to find the largest lakes with thick
ranks of pines bearing down on them, often swamped in the summer floods
and paying the inevitable penalty for such encroachment. Here in wet
coves of the hills harbors that crowd of bloom that makes the wonder of
the Sierra canons.

They drift under the alternate flicker and gloom of the windy rooms of
pines, in gray rock shelters, and by the ooze of blind springs, and
their juxtapositions are the best imaginable