of a
small rustic bridge where she stopped to rest. The stream at her feet
was noisy and icy cold. It rushed through narrow defiles in the rock,
beat itself to foam against the faces a of the big stones, fell over
jutting cliffs, spread in whispering pools, wound back and forth
across the road at its will, singing every foot of its downward way
and watering beds of crisp, cool miners' lettuce, great ferns, and
heliotrope, climbing clematis, soil and blue-eyed grass. All along
its length grew willows, and in a few places white-bodied sycamores.
Everywhere over the walls red above it that vegetation could find a
footing grew mosses, vines, flowers, and shrubs. On the shadiest side
homed most of the ferns and the Cotyledon. In the sun, larkspur, lupin,
and monkey flower; everywhere wild rose, holly, mahogany, gooseberry,
and bayoneted yucca all intermingling in a curtain of variegated greens,
brocaded with flower arabesques of vivid red, white, yellow, and blue.
Canyon wrens and vireos sang as they nested. The air was clear, cool,
and salty from the near-by sea. Myriad leaf shadows danced on the black
roadbed, level as a barn floor, and across it trailed the wavering
image of hawk and vulture, gull and white sea swallow. Linda studied the
canyon with intent eyes, but bruised flesh pleaded, so reluctantly she
arose, shouldered her belongings, and slowly followed the road out to
the car line that passed through Lilac Valley, still carefully bearing
in triumph the precious Cotyledon. An hour later she entered the
driveway of her home. She stopped to set her plant carefully in the wild
garden she and her father had worked all her life at collecting, then
followed the back porch and kitchen route.

"Whatever have ye been doing to yourself, honey?" cried Katy.

"I came a cropper down Multiflores Canyon where it is so steep that it
leans the other way. I pretty well pulverized myself for a pulverulent,
Katy, which is a poor joke."

"Now ain't that just my luck!" wailed Katy, snatching a cake cutter and
beginning hurriedly to stamp out little cakes from the dough before her.

"Well, I don't understand in exactly what way," said Linda, absently
rubbing her elbows and her knees. "Seems to me it's my promontories that
have been knocked off, not yours, Katy."

"Yes, and ain't it just like ye," said Katy, "to be coming in late, and
all banged up when Miss Eileen has got sudden notice that there is going
to be company again and I h