278 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



in our gardens; geraniums and red-hot pokers, which in 

 places turned the glades to a fire color. Yet others either 

 were like, or looked like, our own wild flowers: orange 

 lady-slippers, red gladiolus on stalks six feet high, pansy- 

 like violets, and blackberries and yellow raspberries. There 

 were stretches of bushes bearing masses of small red or 

 large white flowers shaped somewhat like columbines, or 

 like the garden balsam; the red flower bushes were under 

 the bamboos, the white at a lower level. The crests and 

 upper slopes of the mountains were clothed in the green 

 uniformity of the bamboo forest, the trail winding dim under 

 its dark archway of tall, close-growing stems. Lower down 

 were junipers and yews, and then many other trees, with 

 among them tree ferns and strange dragon-trees with lily- 

 like frondage. Zone succeeded zone from top to bottom, 

 each marked by a different plant life. 



In this part of Africa, where flowers bloom and birds 

 sing all the year round, there is no such burst of bloom and 

 song as in the northern spring and early summer. There is 

 nothing like the mass of blossoms which carpet the meadows 

 of the high mountain valleys and far northern meadows, 

 during their brief high tide of life, when one short joyous 

 burst of teeming and vital beauty atones for the long death 

 of the iron fall and winter. So it is with the bird songs. 

 Many of them are beautiful, though to my ears none quite 

 as beautiful as the best of our own bird songs. At any rate 

 there is nothing that quite corresponds to the chorus that 

 during May and June moves northward from the Gulf 

 States and southern California to Maine, Minnesota, and 

 Oregon, to Ontario and Saskatchewan; when there comes 

 the great vernal burst of bloom and song; when the may- 

 flower, bloodroot, wake-robin, anemone, adder's tongue, 

 liverwort, shadblow, dogwood, redbud, gladden the woods; 

 when mocking-birds and cardinals sing in the magnolia 

 groves of the South, and hermit thrushes, winter wrens, 

 and sweetheart sparrows in the spruce and hemlock forests 

 of the North; when bobolinks in the East and meadow- 



