ON CERTAIN CALIFORNIA SPECIALTIES AND 

 RARITIES 



NOW and then at some California rural resort 

 tourist hotel or summer mountain-camp I 

 meet upon the trail a person with perplexed face, 

 a few sprigs of wild flowers, and a pocket edition 

 of Gray's " Manual of Botany." I recognize the 

 tenderfoot botanist, and a dozen years of desultory 

 herborizing on the Coast have not, I am humbly 

 thankful to say, hardened me to her case. (I say 

 her merely for simplicity of diction and in default 

 of our language's sadly needed double-gender pro- 

 noun; sometimes she is a man.) Nobody told her 

 before she left the East, or if anybody did, she did 

 not realize the significance of the report, that Flora 

 turns over a new leaf at the Rocky Mountains and 

 yet another at the Sierra Nevada, and that in all 

 California she would find scarcely an indigenous 

 herb, bush or tree that would be familiar to her. 

 There are pines, to be sure, and oaks, but not one 

 is of a species she loved in her dear New England 



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