ety to the country of the social
shrubs. These chiefly clothe the benches and eastern foot-slopes of the
Sierras,--great spreads of artemisia, coleogyne, and spinosa, suffering
no other woody stemmed thing in their purlieus; this by election
apparently, with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each their
clientele of flowering herbs. It would be worth knowing how much the
devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants to the
shelter of the prickle-bushes. It might have begun earlier, in the time
Seyavi of the campoodie tells of, when antelope ran on the mesa like
sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears itself except
from the midst of some stout twigged shrub; larkspur in the coleogyne,
and for every spinosa the purpling coils of phacelia. In the shrub
shelter, in the season, flock the little stemless things whose blossom
time is as short as a marriage song. The larkspurs make the best
showing, being tall and sweet, swaying a little above the shrubbery,
scattering pollen dust which Navajo brides gather to fill their marriage
baskets. This were an easier task than to find two of them of a shade.
Larkspurs in the botany are blue, but if you were to slip rein to the
stub of some black sage and set about proving it you would be still
at it by the hour when the white gilias set their pale disks to the
westering sun. This is the gilia the children call "evening snow," and
it is no use trying to improve on children's names for wild flowers.

From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a shifty
yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then as soon as
ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the sidelong ranges, come
little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the edge of the sand. By dusk
there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped
corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa wind as if they were real flakes
shaken out of a cloud, not sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch
stems. They keep awake all night, and all the air is heavy and musky
sweet because of them.

Farther south on the trail there will be poppies meeting ankle deep, and
singly, peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus blown out at the tops of
tall stems. But before the season is in tune for the gayer blossoms the
best display of color is in the lupin wash. There is always a lupin wash
somewhere on the mesa trail,--a broad, shallow, cobble-paved sink of
vanished waters, wher