. 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 all the wood is still, the crepitatious rustle of the
unfolding leaves and the pushing flower-stalk within, that has open
blossoms before it has fairly uncramped from the sheath. It commends
itself by a certain exclusiveness of growth, taking enough room and
never elbowing; for if the flora of the lake region has a fault it is
that there is too much of it. We have more than three hundred species
from Kearsarge Canon alone, and if that does not include them all it is
because they were already collected otherwhere.

One expects to find lakes down to about nine thousand feet, leading into
each other by comparatively open ripple slopes and white cascades. Below
the lakes are filled basins that are still spongy swamps, or substantial
meadows, as they get down and down.

Here begin the stream tangles. On the east slopes of the middle Sierras
the pines, all but an occasional yellow variety, desert the stream
borders about the level of the lowest lakes, and the birches and
tree-willows begin. The firs hold on almost to the mesa levels,--there
are no foothills on this eastern slope,--and whoever has firs misses
nothing else. It goes without saying that a tree that can afford to take
fifty years to its first fruiting will repay acquaintance. It keeps,
too, all that half century, a virginal grace of outline, but having once
flowered, begins quietly to put away the things of its youth. Year by
year the lower rounds of boughs are shed, leaving no scar; year by year
the star-branched minarets approach the sky. A fir-tree loves a water
border, loves a long wind in a draughty canon, loves to spend itself
secretly on the inner finishings of its burnished, shapely cones. Broken
open in mid-season the petal-shaped scales show a crimson satin surface,
perfect as a rose.

The birch--the brown-bark western birch characteristic of lower stream
tangles--