Slight Rainstorms Are Likely To Be Encountered In A
Trip Round The Mountain, But One May Easily Find Shelter Beneath Well-Thatched Trees That Shed The Rain Like A Roof.
Then the shining of
the wet leaves is delightful, and the steamy fragrance, and the burst
of bird song from a multitude of thrushes and finches and warblers
that have nests in the chaparral.
The nights, too, are delightful, watching with Shasta beneath the
great starry done. A thousand thousand voices are heard, but so
finely blended they seem a part of the night itself, and make a deeper
silence. And how grandly do the great logs and branches of your
campfire give forth the heat and light that during their long century-lives they have so slowly gathered from the sun, storing it away in
beautiful dotted cells and beads of amber gum! The neighboring trees
look into the charmed circle as if the noon of another day had come,
familiar flowers and grasses that chance to be near seem far more
beautiful and impressive than by day, and as the dead trees give forth
their light all the other riches of their lives seem to be set free
and with the rejoicing flames rise again to the sky. In setting out
from Strawberry Valley, by bearing off to the northwestward a few
miles you may see
"...beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads,
And [bless] the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers."
This is one of the few places in California where the charming linnaea
is found, though it is common to the northward through Oregon and
Washington.
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