148 East and West 
cultivated crop on the mountains thrived like 
this which cost no labour at all. 
Early next day in the fresh morning air, I 
descended the trail to the San Marcos road, 
seeing the brilliant flowers of the crimson 
warrior, a handsome cousin of our plain wood 
betony, growing in rocky places under the 
chaparral. A vast fog lay over the sea obscur- 
ing it as if by an immense ice floe, for from 
that height the fog below, extending from 
the base of the mountain to the horizon line, 
resembled a frozen sea. But in the direction 
of my journey, not the smallest cloud could 
be seen and the sunlight was the clear sun- 
light of the desert. 
In shady spots, banks above the road were 
fringed with saxifrage and the delicate white 
blossoms of the Romanzoffia. Here too were 
the shade-loving phacelias, not tens, but 
thousands—tangles and thickets of them. 
Little excursions of this sort through the 
country make one sensible of the peculiarities 
of plants, their whims and preferences. They 
are as particular and as peculiar as human 
beings in their vay and, as with us, there is 
sometimes less“affinity between members of 
the same family than between those of wholly 
different families. Thus the large purple 
