Here, where the forest shadows ever sleep,
The mountain-lily lifts its chalice white;
The myriad ferns hang draperies soft and white
Thick on each mossy bank and watered steep,
Where slender deer tread softly in the night—
Down in the redwood canyons dark and deep.
LILLIAN H. SHUEY,
in Among the Redwoods.
MARCH 22.
You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy and gradually ascending creek-bed of a canyon, a half hour of laboring steepness in the overarching mountain lilac and laurel. There you came to a great rock gateway which seemed the top of the world. * * * Beyond the gateway a lush level canyon into which you plunged as into a bath; then again the laboring trail, up and always up toward the blue California sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chaparral into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the fine angular shale of the upper regions. Beyond the apparent summit you found always other summits yet to be climbed, and all at once, like thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you looked over the top.