a golden dust of minute hairs. Some of the trees have hardly any
main trunk, dividing near the ground into large wide-spreading limbs,
and these, dividing again and again, terminate in long, drooping,
cord-like branchlets, many of which reach nearly to the ground, while a
dense canopy of short, shining, leafy branchlets forms a round head
which looks something like a cumulus cloud when the sunshine is
pouring over it.

[Illustration: CAMP, NORTH FORK OF THE MERCED]

[Illustration: MOUNTAIN LIVE OAK (_Quercus chrysolepis_), EIGHT FEET IN
DIAMETER]

A marked plant is the bush poppy (_Dendromecon rigidum_), found on the
hot hillsides near camp, the only woody member of the order I have yet
met in all my walks. Its flowers are bright orange yellow, an inch to
two inches wide, fruit-pods three or four inches long, slender and
curving,--height of bushes about four feet, made up of many slim,
straight branches, radiating from the root,--a companion of the
manzanita and other sun-loving chaparral shrubs.

_June 13._ Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be
dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life
seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or
make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good
practical sort of immortality. Yonder rises another white skyland. How
sharply the yellow pine spires and the palm-like crowns of the sugar
pines are outlined on its smooth white domes. And hark! the grand
thunder billows booming, rolling from ridge to ridge, followed by the
faithful shower.

A good many herbaceous plants come thus far up the mountains from the
plains, and are now in flower, two months later than their lowland
relatives. Saw a few columbines to-day. Most of the ferns are in their
prime,--rock ferns on the sunny hillsides, cheilanthes, pellaea,
gymnogramme; woodwardia, aspidium, woodsia along the stream banks, and
the common _Pteris aquilina_ on sandy flats. This last, however common,
is here making shows of strong, exuberant, abounding beauty to set the
botanist wild with admiration. I measured some scarce full grown that
are more than seven feet high. Though the commonest and most widely
distributed of all the ferns, I might almost say that I never saw it
before. The broad-shouldered fronds held high on smooth stout stalks
growing close together, overleaning and overlapping, make a complete
ceiling, beneath which one may walk erect