taboose. The common reed of the ultramontane marshes (here
Phragmites vulgaris), a very stately, whispering reed, light

and strong for shafts or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which
makes a passable sugar.

It seems the secrets of plant powers and influences yield
themselves most readily to primitive peoples, at least one never

hears of the knowledge coming from any other source. The Indian
never concerns himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the

plant's appearances and relations, but with what it can do for him.
It can do much, but how do you suppose he finds it out; what

instincts or accidents guide him? How does a cat know when to eat
catnip? Why do western bred cattle avoid loco weed, and strangers

eat it and go mad? One might suppose that in a time of famine the
Paiutes digged wild parsnip in meadow corners and died from eating

it, and so learned to produce death swiftly and at will. But how
did they learn, repenting in the last agony, that animal fat is the

best antidote for its virulence; and who taught them that the
essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis), which looks to

have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in stomachic
disorders. But they so understand and so use. One believes it to

be a sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a complexer
civilization. I remember very well when I came first upon a wet

meadow of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or use. It
looked potent; the cool, shiny leaves, the succulent, pink

stems and fruity bloom. A little touch, a hint, a word, and I
should have known what use to put them to. So I felt, unwilling to

leave it until we had come to an understanding. So a musician
might have felt in the presence of an instrument known to

be within his province, but beyond his power. It was with the
relieved sense of having shaped a long surmise that I watched the

Senora Romero make a poultice of it for my burned hand.
On, down from the lower lakes to the village weirs, the brown

and golden disks of helenum have beauty as a sufficient
excuse for being. The plants anchor out on tiny capes, or

mid-stream islets, with the nearly sessile radicle leaves
submerged. The flowers keep up a constant trepidation in time with

the hasty water beating at their stems, a quivering, instinct with
life, that seems always at the point of breaking into flight; just

as the babble of the watercourses always approaches articulation
but never quite achieves it. Although of wide range the helenum

never makes itself common through profusion, and may be looked for
in the same places from year to year. Another lake dweller that

comes down to the ploughed lands is the red columbine. (
C.truncata). It requires no encouragement other than shade, but

grows too rank in the summer heats and loses its wildwood grace.
A common enough orchid in these parts is the false lady's slipper

(Epipactis gigantea), one that springs up by any water where
there is sufficient growth of other sorts to give it countenance.

It seems to thrive best in an atmosphere of suffocation.
The middle Sierras fall off abruptlyeastward toward

the high valleys. Peaks of the fourteen thousand class, belted
with sombre swathes of pine, rise almost directly from the bench

lands with no foothill approaches. At the lower edge of the bench
or mesa the land falls away, often by a fault, to the river

hollows, and along the drop one looks for springs or intermittent
swampy swales. Here the plant world resembles a little the lake

gardens, modified by altitude and the use the town folk put it to
for pasture. Here are cress, blue violets, potentilla, and, in the

damp of the willow fence-rows, white false asphodels. I am sure we
make too free use of this word FALSE in naming plants--false

mallow, false lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at least no
falsifier, but a true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though

small of flower and run mostly to leaves, and should have a name
that gives it credit for growing up in such celestial semblance.

Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres
wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy

fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are too thin and
sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full fields

have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand, and
quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal. A very

poet's flower, I thought; not fit for gathering up, and proving a
nuisance in the pastures, therefore needing to be the more loved.

And one day I caught Winnenap' drawing out from mid leaf a
fine strong fibre for making snares. The borders of the iris

fields are pure gold, nearly sessile buttercups and a
creeping-stemmed composite of a redder hue. I am convinced that

English-speaking children will always have buttercups. If they do
not light upon the original companion of little frogs they will

take the next best and cherish it accordingly. I find five
unrelated species loved by that name, and as many more and as

inappropriately called cowslips.
By every mesa spring one may expect to find a single shrub of

the buckthorn, called of old time Cascara sagrada--the
sacred bark. Up in the canons, within the limit of the rains, it

seeks rather a stony slope, but in the dry valleys is not found
away from water borders.

In all the valleys and along the desert edges of the west are
considerable areas of soil sickly with alkali-collecting pools,

black and evil-smelling like old blood. Very little grows
hereabout but thick-leaved pickle weed. Curiously enough, in

this stiff mud, along roadways where there is frequently a little
leakage from canals, grows the only western representative of the

true heliotropes (Heliotropium curassavicum). It has
flowers of faded white, foliage of faded green, resembling the

"live-for-ever" of old gardens and graveyards, but even less
attractive. After so much schooling in the virtues of

water-seeking plants, one is not surprised to learn that
its mucilaginous sap has healing powers.

Last and inevitableresort of overflow waters is the tulares,
great wastes of reeds (Juncus) in sickly, slow streams. The

reeds, called tules, are ghostly pale in winter, in summer deep
poisonous-looking green, the waters thick and brown; the reed beds

breaking into dingy pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow
winding water lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow

inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high above the water;
cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them. Old stalks

succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the weight
as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little

islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out
cut deeper channels, gnaw off the edges of the solid earth.

The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we
have meant to explore them and have never done so. It must be a

happy mystery. So you would think to hear the redwinged blackbirds
proclaim it clear March mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock

a myriad, shelter in the dry, whispering stems. They make little
arched runways deep into the heart of the tule beds. Miles across

the valley one hears the clamor of their high, keen flutings in the
mating weather.

Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any
day's venture will raise from open shallows the great blue

heron on his hollow wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry
continually from the glassy pools, the bittern's hollow boom rolls

along the water paths. Strange and farflown fowl drop down against
the saffron, autumn sky. All day wings beat above it hazy with

speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in the twilight. By night
one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One wishes for, but

gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have swallowed up.
What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of the

tulares.
NURSLINGS OF THE SKY