THE DESERT REJOICES 243 



of numeration ; but, as far as the appearance of 

 the place is concerned, it is scarcely more like a 

 flower garden than like a billiard table. A care- 

 less traveler — and not so very careless, neither 

 — might tread the blossoms under his feet for 

 miles without seeing so much as one of them. 

 They are desert flowers ; vegetable Lilliputians ; 

 minute, almost microscopic, for the most part, 

 as if moisture had been doled out to them by 

 the drop or the thimbleful, as indeed it has 

 been ; and the few that are larger have in the 

 main a weedy aspect, such as blinds the eye of 

 the ordinary non-observer, to whom, rightly or 

 wrongly, a flower is one thing and a weed an- 

 other. As for the tiny ones, the overwhelming 

 majority, a blossom that you can see in its place 

 only by getting down on your knees to look for 

 it may be a " flower " to a botanist, but hardly 

 to a plain, unlettered, matter-of-fact citizen. 



And still, after the prophetic manner, the 

 prediction has come true. The desert has blos- 

 somed abundantly. As it now is, I can imagine 

 that it would be a place of unspeakable interest 

 to a philosophic botanist. He would know, pre- 

 sumably, what I do not, whether these starveling 

 races, existers upon nothing, are to be accounted 

 species by themselves, or only stunted representa- 

 tives of species that under favoring conditions 



