the lichens and mosses clothe the cold, gray ledges with their sheltering mantle.

Everywhere grows the shrubby lupine, that will soon have long spikes of yellow blossoms. If one turns away from the sea and goes toward the pine woods, there are little red pimpernels growing along the roadside.

The exquisitely fragrant immortelle holds up soft white cushions of bloom, and every little watercourse is green with ferns. The fragrant yerba buena, which creeps vinelike about the roots of the trees, is regarded by the native Californian very much as the peppermint is looked upon by the Yankee gatherer of simples—a panacea for every ill. The grass is so thick and tall that it hides the heavy coating of pine needles. Here are two or three kinds of clover, mustard, mallow, and foxtail grass.

Here is an unmistakable thistle, with purple-green foliage. Yarrow is abundant with its feathery foliage. Baby pines are springing everywhere and crowding each other like human babies.

Along the shore endless varieties of coral-like growths, the mosses and lichens of the water world, are strewn about. There are gauze-like sails of innumerable little Portuguese men-of-war. In the summer the sand is often blue with these fairy shallops.

The beach is full of treasures: Little abalones lined with bits of rainbow, limpets white as ivory, turban shells, periwinkles, coffee beans, rice shells, and dainty bivalves of a dozen sorts. The sand hue is half made of their tiny fragments.

The sea-mosses, lying in sandy heaps, look as if, with Emerson's," they had left their beauty on the shore," but when floated out on sheets of paper they spread into forms of marvelous beauty. They are more like fine drawings of Jack Frost than anything else, but their beauty is of

another school, and their colors are of tender green, rose, pink, crimson, garnet, and browns of every shade, and gray as soft as twilight.

How many of the shells here mentioned have you seen? Which of the flowers mentioned grow in your locality? Which of these shells and flowers do you think are found on the Atlantic coast.

20. FORESTS OF THE COAST RANGE.

The Coast Range of mountains in California is a paradise of forest trees and flowering shrubs.

Here can be found the extremes of tree growth: the hardy species of the north and the delicate representatives of the south.

The resinous breath of pine and hemlock, juniper and fir, mingles on the same hillside with the spicy fragrance of the bay-tree and the native nutmeg.

At Monterey the pines grow down to the water's edge, and reaching back to the mountain tops are pines the twisted-branched, the prickly-coned, the hook-coned, the swamp, the sugar, the scrub, the nut pine. There are tall oaks from little acorns grown, and large acorns grown from little oaks. There is a gnarled, rheumaticlooking live oak, an evergreen white oak, a black and a blue oak, and the so-called "poison oak."

One of the most beautiful of all the trees of the coast is the madrone, or arbutus tree. Its foliage is light and airy. Its leaves are oblong, pale beneath, bright green above. Its bloom is in dense racemes of cream-white flowers; its fruit a dry, orange-colored berry.

But the charm of the madrone is in its bark, or rather its skin-soft and smooth and delicate as a baby's shoulder. In the summer sunlight these trees glisten with the rich color of polished cinnamon, and in the

shadows of spring-time they are in velvets of old-gold and sage-green.

In the central part of the Coast Range, where the ocean mist lingers longest, the redwood, the Apollo of the forest, stands thickest and straightest. The "tall pine of the northern forests," over which the Indian chief Red Jacket mourned, was a stripling beside this Hercules of an evergreen. Its height is from two to three hundred feet. It is straight as an arrow, and tapers from base to tip like a mast. Its girt is often so great that ten men with outstretched arms could not reach around one tree.

Its bark is brown and clean, and beautifully seamed. Its wood is soft and straight-grained and fragrant, and in color more of a maroon than a red. Its cone is long and round, and the silver of its double under leaf is a choice tint of the moonlight.

Felled to the earth, one of these great trees will supply enough material to frame and board and shingle a whole house.

Valuable, beautiful, and majestic as is the redwood, it has been shamefully wasted by the woodmen of the West. It seems as if nature felt this shame, too, for about the stump of every fallen favorite she sets a closed circle of the same green species to stand and guard this living tomb.

To be memorized:

- F. M. Somers.

The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned
To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,

And spread the roof above them ere he framed

The lofty vault, to gather and roll back

The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down
And offered to the Mightiest, solemn thanks
And supplication.

- From A Forest Hymn, by W. C. Bryant.

Pronunciations.

Definitions.

ma drōne'; ra çēme'; ar chi trave.

Resinous, smelling like resin. Rheumatic, twisted as if having had rheumatism. Maroon, a brownish-crimson color. Majestic, kingly. Raceme, a cluster of flowers along the side of a stem. Architrave, the top of a shaft or column. Anthem, solemn music.

Spell all the words defined.

Why is the redwood called the Apollo and the Hercules of the woods? How do pine trees bear their seeds? Name the uses of pine seeds. Is the Eastern arbutus, or May-flower, found upon a tree? In what valley of California do palms grow wild?

21. VISIT TO THE BIG TREES.

Mrs. Jessie Benton Fremont, the writer of this sketch, was the wife of General John C. Fremont, the "Pathfinder," who is so well known in the early history of California.

Articulation. - soft | grass | and | wild | flowers.

One morning we set out to see the big trees. The place had not then been made a national reservation; it was only a beautiful solitude. The pure morning air grew sweeter as we advanced through the splendid gloom of the pine forest, which makes a fitting approach to the giant trees.

All the long spring day we traveled through the pines, in Indian file, along the narrow mule trail, up a continuous ascent. The trees stood close together and the sunlight, high, high above, filtered down in golden rays and splashes on the thick, dark carpet of pine-tags, grasses, and flowers that crowded to border the trail.

We were constantly coming into the homes of new blossoms, and as we ascended we found the red spike of the snow-flower. We slept that night on the soft outer ends of hemlock boughs, upon a pile so high that we had to reach its top by a run and jump.

The big stars were close over head and the perfumed mountain air blew softly all around us, but we fell asleep too soon to know much about the beauty of it all.

We had thought that nothing could be more nobly beautiful than the forest we had crossed the day before. But the new day brought us enchanting natural parks of grassy upland with fir and hemlock borders. The lower boughs, tipped with the lighter green of the spring growth, rested in tent-like spread on soft grass and wild flowers, with breaks here and there in the trees, giving us glimpses across the valley to the near Yosemite range.

Presently, as we came around a turn, something, blocking the way, as a light-house might, rose in mighty bulk. It was a tawny-barked tree over one hundred feet around, uprearing its wonderful column, unbroken by any limb, for five score feet. It was our first Giant Sequoia. Standing apart, with a natural clearing about it, and contrasted with the sprightly young firs, it was overwhelmingly grand.

Our party rode on horseback through one fallen tree, its trunk having been tunneled out by fire. Another had fallen recently. The earth was still fresh about its remarkably shallow roots. The surveyor's tape measured one hundred and twenty-six feet of bare trunk before the first bough put out. The boughs were short and the cones so small as to seem insignificant beside the vast height and bulk. The rugged bark was curious, fully a foot thick, cinnamon-colored, and in shallow flutings like a roughly chiseled column.

- Jessie Benton Fremont.

I walked up and down amid the mighty columns that prop heaven on the Sierra summit in Sequoia Park, and felt more like planting trees, more gratitude to the Eternal, more glory in my great land than I ever felt before. Such a temple no man ever saw or conceived of who has not seen Sequoia Park. Snow peaks peeping down at you between the mighty columns; a roaring