4 AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS 



But I was going to recount my new finds. 

 One sprang up in the footsteps of that destroy- 

 ing angel, Dynamite. A new railroad cut 

 across my tramping-ground, with its hordes of 

 Italian laborers and its mountains of giant- 

 powder, etc., was enough to banish all the 

 gentler deities forever from the place. But it 

 did not. Scarcely had the earthquake passed 

 when, walking at the base of a rocky cliff that 

 had been partly blown away in the search for 

 stone for two huge abutments that stood near 

 by, I beheld the ddbris at the base of the cliflf 

 draped and festooned by one of our most beau- 

 tiful foliage plants, and one I had long been on 

 the lookout for, namely, the climbing fumitory. 

 It was growing everywhere in the greatest pro- 

 fusion, affording by its tenderness, delicacy, 

 and grace the most striking contrast to the 

 destruction the black giant had wrought. The 

 power that had smote the rock seemed to have 

 called it into being. Probably the seeds had 

 lain dormant in cracks and crevices for years, 

 and when the catastrophe came, and they found 

 themselves in new soil amid the wreck of the 

 old order of things, they sprang into new life, 

 and grew as if the world had been created anew 

 for them, as, in a sense, it had. Certainly, 

 they grew most luxuriantly, and never was the 

 ruin wrought by powder veiled by more deli- 

 cate lace-like foliage. ^ The panicles of droop- 



1 Strange to say, the plant did not appear in that locality 

 the next season, and has never appeared since. Perhaps it 

 will take another dynamite earthquake to wake it up. 



