stillness of the timber-line, but chipmunks inhabit here, as may be

guessed by the gnawed ruddy cones of the pines, and lowering hours
the woodchucks come down to the water. On a little spit of land

running into Windy Lake we found one summer the evidence of a
tragedy; a pair of sheep's horns not fully grown caught in the

crotch of a pine where the living sheep must have lodged
them. The trunk of the tree had quite closed over them, and the

skull bones crumbled away from the weathered horn cases. We hoped
it was not too far out of the running of night prowlers to have put

a speedy end to the long agony, but we could not be sure. I never
liked the spit of Windy Lake again.

It seems that all snow nourished plants count nothing so
excellent in their kind as to be forehanded with their bloom,

working secretly to that end under the high piled winters. The
heathers begin by the lake borders, while little sodden drifts

still shelter under their branches. I have seen the tiniest of
them (Kalmia glauca) blooming, and with well-formed fruit,

a foot away from a snowbank 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 inevitablepenalty 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 alternateflicker 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 franklyoffensive 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 substantialmeadows, 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 quaintance" target="_blank" title="n.相识；熟人，相识的人">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. Years 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--is a spoil sport. It grows thickly to choke
the stream that feeds it; grudges it the sky and space for angler's

rod and fly. The willows do better; painted-cup, cypripedium, and
the hollow stalks of span-broad white umbels, find a footing among

their stems. But in general the steep plunges, the white swirls,
green and tawny pools, the gliding hush of waters between

the meadows and the mesas afford little fishing and few flowers.
One looks for these to begin again when once free of the

rifted canon walls; the high note of babble and laughter falls off
to the steadier mellow tone of a stream that knows its purpose and

reflects the sky.
OTHER WATER BORDERS

It is the proper destiny of every considerablestream in the west
to become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are

willing. They go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable
lands in their own boulder fenced gullies--but how much farther in

the man-made waterways. It is difficult to come into intimate
relations with appropriated waters; like very busy people they have

no time to reveal themselves. One needs to have known an
irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to have lived by it, to

mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning, rising and
falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far across the

valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke, the
shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons

stalking the little glinting weirs across the field.
Perhaps to get into the mood of the waterways one needs to

have seen old Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with his gun,
guarding his water-right toward the end of a dry summer.

Amos owned the half of Tule Creek and the other half pertained to
the neighboring Greenfields ranch. Years of a "short water crop,"

that is, when too little snow fell on the high pine ridges, or,
falling, melted too early, Amos held that it took all the water

that came down to make his half, and maintained it with a
Winchester and a deadly aim. Jesus Montana, first proprietor of

Greenfields,--you can see at once that Judson had the racial
advantage,--contesting the right with him, walked into five of

Judson's bullets and his eternal possessions on the same occasion.
That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition.

Twelve years later one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so
very green by now, shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that

also might become classic, but the jury found for manslaughter. It
had the effect of discouraging the Greenfields claim, but Amos used

to sit on the headgate just the same, as quaint and lone a figure
as the sandhill crane watching for water toads below the Tule drop.