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 tunnels 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. Lilies come up out of fern
beds, columbine swings over meadowsweet, white rein-orchids quake in the
leaning grass. Open swales, where in wet years may be running water, are
plantations of false hellebore (Veratrum californicum), tall, branched
candelabra of greenish bloom above the sessile, sheathing, boat-shaped
leaves, semi-translucent in the sun. A stately plant of the lily family,
but why "false?" It is frankly offensive in its character, and its young
juices deadly as any hellebore that ever grew.

Like most mountain herbs, it has an uncanny haste to bloom. One hears
by night, when