IN CALIFORNIA 91 



bearing from the mountains the singing waters of 

 many brooks to irrigate the plain, I like to go for 

 my first wild flowers. I have never yet been able 

 to make up my mind as to which of all the lovely 

 multitude is really first. Perhaps the truth is, there 

 is no first. Doubtless it is with flowers as with 

 men, the laurel of the champion is sooner or later 

 snatched away by some succeeding competitor, who 

 in his turn loses to another. So one year it may be 

 the California peony, whose black-crimson globes 

 filled with golden anthers, I have found nodding on 

 their leafy stalks in January; another year, the 

 white dentaria, California cousin of the pepper root 

 of Eastern woods and exquisite as the garden snow- 

 drop whose modest grace it simulates, may lead the 

 procession ; or again it may be the fuchsia-flowered 

 gooseberry whose bending branches virgin-leaved 

 and fringed with a hundred scarlet pendants of 

 bloom, have swept my face in many a trail, when 

 the year has been but a few weeks old. A rosy little 

 portulaca (Calandrlnia Menziesii), is another very 

 early comer that twinkles brightly in the midst of 

 wild grasses, and sometimes assembles a mass meet- 

 ing of its own kind so successfully as to make a 

 blush upon the mesa's cheek, visible from quite a 

 distance. 

 Among the first arrivals, too, I count upon find- 



