TREES AND TREE-LIKE GROWTHS 45 



flow of lilac and laburnum over old rosy brick walls ! 

 Those sea-washed Devon villages, each cottage 

 plot a bower of floral gold! Those steep lakeland 

 streets which I used to climb with you, lady of my 

 dedication, to the dark-firred Beacon, each garden 

 raining yellow largess upon its neighbor next below! 

 Excuse the lapse, good reader, and in return I will 

 wish that you may never know the sharpness of exile. 



On the side of usefulness the palo verde has its 

 virtues as well. Its beans are grist for the pestle and 

 mortar of the Indian squaw; and though usually a 

 small tree, it is capable of growth to a size that 

 would furnish lodgment to man. There is a palo 

 verde near the mouth of Deep Canon that I take to 

 be the Goliath of its tribe. The trunk at its narrow- 

 est aboveground is eight and a quarter feet in girth, 

 the largest limb five feet around, and the space cov- 

 ered by the tree has a circumference of seventy 

 yards. For the desert, that is a triumph of tree 

 growth. I do not know of another palo verde that 

 comes to half its size. 



The smoke-tree, Parosela spinosa, may hardly be 

 called a tree, though sometimes tree-like in size of 

 stem. More common than the palo verde, it is al- 

 ways a strange and noticeable object. It, too, is 

 leafless, but it is wholly pale gray, a mass of prickly 

 interlaced twigs that at a distance has much the 

 look of a cloud of smoke. It is the characteristic 

 plant of the desert "washes" or water-courses. I 

 have often found the beds of these fugitive streams 

 filled for miles with this ghostly semblance of a river. 

 To see this phantom river come winding out, snake- 



