bristly mane of chaparral. Here
and there small openings occur on rocky places, commanding fine views
across the cultivated valley to the ocean. These I found by the tracks
were favorite outlooks and resting-places for the wild animals--bears,
wolves, foxes, wildcats, etc.--which abound here, and would have to be
taken into account in the establishment of bee-ranches. In the deepest
thickets I found wood-rat villages--groups of huts four to six feet
high, built of sticks and leaves in rough, tapering piles, like musk-rat
cabins. I noticed a good many bees, too, most of them wild. The tame
honey-bees seemed languid and wing-weary, as if they had come all the
way up from the flowerless valley.

After reaching the summit I had time to make only a hasty survey of the
basin, now glowing in the sunset gold, before hastening down into one of
the tributary canons in search, of water. Emerging from a particularly
tedious breadth of chaparral, I found myself free and erect in a
beautiful park-like grove of Mountain Live Oak, where the ground was
planted with aspidiums and brier-roses, while the glossy foliage made a
close canopy overhead, leaving the gray dividing trunks bare to show the
beauty of their interlacing arches. The bottom of the canon was dry
where I first reached it, but a bunch of scarlet mimulus indicated water
at no great distance, and I soon discovered about a bucketful in a
hollow of the rock. This, however, was full of dead bees, wasps,
beetles, and leaves, well steeped and simmered, and would, therefore,
require boiling and filtering through fresh charcoal before it could be
made available. Tracing the dry channel about a mile farther down to its
junction with a larger tributary canon, I at length discovered a lot of
boulder pools, clear as crystal, brimming full, and linked together by
glistening streamlets just strong enough to sing audibly. Flowers in
full bloom adorned their margins, lilies ten feet high, larkspur,
columbines, and luxuriant ferns, leaning and overarching in lavish
abundance, while a noble old Live Oak spread its rugged arms over all.
Here I camped, making my bed on smooth cobblestones.

[Illustration: A BEE-KEEPER'S CABIN.--BURRIELIA (ABOVE).--MADIA
(BELOW).]

Next day, in the channel of a tributary that heads on Mount San Antonio,
I passed about fifteen or twenty gardens like the one in which I
slept--lilies in every one of them, in the full pomp of bloom. My third
camp was made near t