hrubby species. Here
also I found bryanthus, a charming heathwort covered with purple flowers
and dark green foliage like heather, and three trees new to me--a
hemlock and two pines. The hemlock (_Tsuga Mertensiana_) is the most
beautiful conifer I have ever seen; the branches and also the main axis
droop in a singularly graceful way, and the dense foliage covers the
delicate, sensitive, swaying branchlets all around. It is now in full
bloom, and the flowers, together with thousands of last season's cones
still clinging to the drooping sprays, display wonderful wealth of
color, brown and purple and blue. Gladly I climbed the first tree I
found to revel in the midst of it. How the touch of the flowers makes
one's flesh tingle! The pistillate are dark, rich purple, and almost
translucent, the staminate blue,--a vivid, pure tone of blue like the
mountain sky,--the most uncommonly beautiful of all the Sierra tree
flowers I have seen. How wonderful that, with all its delicate feminine
grace and beauty of form and dress and behavior, this lovely tree up
here, exposed to the wildest blasts, has already endured the storms of
centuries of winters!

The two pines also are brave storm-enduring trees, the mountain pine
(_Pinus monticola_) and the dwarf pine (_Pinus albicaulis_). The
mountain pine is closely related to the sugar pine, though the cones are
only about four to six inches long. The largest trees are from five to
six feet in diameter at four feet above the ground, the bark rich brown.
Only a few storm-beaten adventurers approach the summit of the mountain.
The dwarf or white-bark pine is the species that forms the timber-line,
where it is so completely dwarfed that one may walk over the top of a
bed of it as over snow-pressed chaparral.

How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten sky
gardens amid so vast a congregation of onlooking mountains! Strange and
admirable it is that the more savage and chilly and storm-chafed the
mountains, the finer the glow on their faces and the finer the plants
they bear. The myriads of flowers tingeing the mountain-top do not seem
to have grown out of the dry, rough gravel of disintegration, but rather
they appear as visitors, a cloud of witnesses to Nature's love in what
we in our timid ignorance and unbelief call howling desert. The surface
of the ground, so dull and forbidding at first sight, besides being rich
in plants, shines and sparkles with crystals: mica, hornb