SPRING IN WESTERN OREGON. 189 



soft-pink salmon berry and fire-pink wild currants, the native 

 spring flowers by the roadside strike a high note of color. 

 There is a marked contrast to our own delicate, pale-colored, 

 spring blossoms. 



What most impresses an Easterner going to the North- 

 west coast is that all is so familiar and yet so different. 

 It becomes confusing, like well-known voices speaking from 

 unknown presences. When we stop to think, it seems as 

 if something had happened to us instead of to the flowers. 

 Here are white trilliums, dog-tooth violets, yellow violets, 

 and lady's-sorrel, among other old favorites, but all twice 

 as large as those at home and many of them curiously 

 different in color. There are more yellow flowers than at 

 home ; blue flowers are replaced by white ; white ones take 

 a flush of pink. It seems quite homelike to see a familiar 

 flower until it turns up a strange face when you stoop to pet it. 



And yet there is much that is the same. The coast of 

 Puget Sound might be the Maine seacoast, but that it is less 

 rocky and irregular. The woods of Washington and Oregon 

 have much in common with the primeval forest, now almost 

 gone, that once overspread all New England. In many 

 sections there are no round-topped, hardwood trees to fill up 

 the distant prospect, and the tall, spire-pointed pines inarch 

 up the foothills in loose ranks, but they are pines ; and the 

 fir tree does not badly simulate the old-growth hemlock of 

 our Eastern forests. And when, in some upland gully, among 

 brakes and alders, I have scared the ruffed grouse from his 

 drumming-log, it all seemed home once more. But the alders 

 overhead were a forest ; the brakes in the open rose above 

 my shoulders ; the drumming-log was five feet through. In 

 this enchanted forest only the partridge and myself were of 

 the right dimensions, and he, too, was different. The familiar 



