ELEPHANT HUNTING 
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lady-slippers, red gladiolus on stalks six feet high, pansy¬ 
like violets, and blackberries and yellow raspberries. There 
were stretches of bushes bearing masses of small red or 
large white flowers shaped somewhat like columbines, 
or like the garden balsam; the red flower bushes were under 
the bamboos, the white at a lower level. The crests and 
upper slopes of the mountains were clothed in the green 
uniformity of the bamboo forest, the trail winding dim under 
its dark archway of tall, close-growing stems. Lower down 
were junipers and yews, and then many other trees, with 
among them tree ferns and strange dragon trees with lily¬ 
like frondage. Zone succeeded zone from top to bottom, 
each marked by a different plant life. 
In this part of Africa, where flowers bloom and birds 
sing all the year round, there is no such burst of bloom and 
song as in the northern spring and early summer. There is 
nothing like the mass of blossoms which carpet the meadows 
of the high mountain valleys and far northern meadows, 
during their brief high tide of life, when one short joyous 
burst of teeming and vital beauty atones for the long death 
of the iron fall and winter. So it is with the bird songs. 
Many of them are beautiful, though to my ears none quite 
as beautiful as the best of our own bird songs. At any rate 
there is nothing that quite corresponds to the chorus that 
during May and June moves northward from the Gulf 
States and southern California to Maine, Minnesota, and 
Oregon, to Ontario and Saskatchewan; when there comes 
the great vernal burst of bloom and song; when the may- 
flower, bloodroot, wake-robin, anemone, adder’s tongue, 
liverwort, shadblow, dogwood, redbud, gladden the woods; 
when mocking-birds and cardinals sing in the magnolia 
