IN CALIFORNIA 75 



his belly. This adjusted, we resumed our inarch 

 of discovery. 



For some time my eyes had been caught by what 

 seemed to be a cloudlet of smoke hanging still and 

 low over the desert ahead of us and now three or 

 four more came into view, a couple of hundred yards 

 away. 



"Campers ahead!" I thought. To my astonish- 

 ment, as we drew nearer, the supposititious smoke 

 resolved itself into an airy tangle of grayish twigs 

 and branches, and my cloudlet stood revealed as a 

 small tree with all the tender atmosphere of a paint- 

 ing by Corot. The delicate limbs were clothed in a 

 minute white down to the very tips of the twigs, 

 and though all the rest of the desert shrubbery that 

 day of late March, was in the fulness of its foliage, 

 this little tree was leafless. Spines as sharp as 

 needles were set singly but abundantly upon the 

 branches. Was it dead! I asked. But the Pro- 

 fessor assured me it was very much alive. 



"It is Dalea spinosa," he said, "or smoke tree, a 

 popular name whose accuracy you can now endorse. 

 Indigo bush is another name I have heard for it, but 

 you have to be here in mid- June to understand why. 

 Then these apparently lifeless branches wake up and 

 the whole tree bursts into glorious bloom an al- 

 most solid mass of small pea-blossoms of the rich- 



