ive or
six mosses had already adjusted their hoods and were in the prime of
life; but the flowers were not sufficiently numerous as yet to affect
greatly the general green of the young leaves. Violets made their
appearance in the first week of February, and toward the end of this
month the warmer portions of the plain were already golden with myriads
of the flowers of rayed composite.

This was the full springtime. The sunshine grew warmer and richer, new
plants bloomed every day; the air became more tuneful with humming
wings, and sweeter with the fragrance of the opening flowers. Ants and
ground squirrels were getting ready for their summer work, rubbing their
benumbed limbs, and sunning themselves on the husk-piles before their
doors, and spiders were busy mending their old webs, or weaving new
ones.

In March, the vegetation was more than doubled in depth and color;
claytonia, calandrinia, a large white gilia, and two nemophilas were in
bloom, together with a host of yellow composite, tall enough now to bend
in the wind and show wavering ripples of shade.

In April, plant-life, as a whole, reached its greatest height, and the
plain, over all its varied surface, was mantled with a close, furred
plush of purple and golden corollas. By the end of this month, most of
the species had ripened their seeds, but undecayed, still seemed to be
in bloom from the numerous corolla-like involucres and whorls of chaffy
scales of the composite. In May, the bees found in flower only a few
deep-set liliaceous plants and eriogonums.

June, July, August, and September is the season of rest and sleep,--a
winter of dry heat,--followed in October by a second outburst of bloom
at the very driest time of the year. Then, after the shrunken mass of
leaves and stalks of the dead vegetation crinkle and turn to dust
beneath the foot, as if it had been baked in an oven, _Hemizonia
virgata_, a slender, unobtrusive little plant, from six inches to three
feet high, suddenly makes its appearance in patches miles in extent,
like a resurrection of the bloom of April. I have counted upward of 3000
flowers, five eighths of an inch in diameter, on a single plant. Both
its leaves and stems are so slender as to be nearly invisible, at a
distance of a few yards, amid so showy a multitude of flowers. The ray
and disk flowers are both yellow, the stamens purple, and the texture of
the rays is rich and velvety, like the petals of garden pansies. The
prevail