FIELD-DAYS IN CALIFORNIA 



away. Yet I might appropriately enough have 

 envied the fellow his altitudinous position, if 

 nothing else, remembering how grand and almost 

 grown-up a certain small Massachusetts boy used 

 to feel as he surveyed the world from a perch 

 not half so exalted, in what to his eyes was about 

 the tallest pine tree in the world, up in his 

 father's pasture. 



The most curiously unique of Yosemite plants, 

 to my thinking, is the California nutmeg tree, 

 Torreya californica. I ignore, for sufficient rea- 

 son, the different generic designation adopted in 

 some books more recent than the work of Brewer 

 and Watson. So far as my word goes, my dis- 

 tinguished th cousin shall not be robbed of 



his one genus. Mr. Clark, who remembered Dr. 

 Torrey's and Dr. Gray's visits to the tree, and 

 whose sympathetic account of the affectionate 

 relations subsisting between these two scholars 

 was deeply interesting, instructed me where to 

 look for the nearest examples, at a point below 

 the Cascades, — some eight miles down the El 

 Portal road, — and I devoted a long day to the 

 making of their acquaintance. 



It was the twentieth of June, the weather had 



turned summerish, and the road, which had 



been as dusty as possible — a disgrace to the 



nation that owns it — five or six weeks before, 



192 



