THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 



such an angle with a roll of blankets on your back 

 is not unlike climbing a tree : every limb resists your 

 progress and pushes you back; so that when we at 

 last reached the summit, after twelve or fifteen hun- 

 dred feet of this sort of work, the fight was about 

 all out of the best of us. It was then nearly two 

 o'clock, so that we had been about seven hours in 

 coming seven miles. 



Here on the top of the mountain we overtook 

 spring, which had been gone from the valley nearly 

 a month. Red clover was opening in the valley 

 below, and wild strawberries just ripening ; on the 

 summit the yellow birch was just hanging out its 

 catkins, and the claytonia, or spring-beauty, was in 

 bloom. The leaf-buds of the trees were just burst- 

 ing, making a faint mist of green, which, as the eye 

 swept downward, gradually deepened until it be- 

 came a dense, massive cloud in the valleys. At the 

 foot of the mountain the clintonia, or northern green 

 lily, and the low shadbush were showing their ber- 

 ries, but long before the top was reached they were 

 found in bloom. I had never before stood amid 

 blooming claytonia, a flower of April, and looked 

 down upon a field that held ripening strawberries. 

 Every thousand feet elevation seemed to make about 

 ten days' difference in the vegetation, so that the 

 season was a month or more later on the top of the 

 mountain than at its base. A very pretty flower 

 which we began to meet with well up on the moun- 

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