On going to and examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist trembling around me.

The ground is littered with fallen trunks that lie crossed and recrossed like storm-lodged wheat; and besides this close forest of pines, the rich moraine soil supports a luxuriant growth of ribbon-leaved grassesbromus, triticum, calamagrostis, agrostis, etc., which rear their handsome spikes and panicles above your waist.

[Illustration] Sterile pinnæ pinnate; fronds large, fertile portion green, turning brown, forming a panicle at the top.

The flower panicles in their first stage have erect branches, but as the flowers open these curl over gracefully, resembling a Prince of Wales feather.

Above this, and just below the forest region, there is a dark, heath-like belt of chaparral, composed almost exclusively of Adenostoma fasciculata, a bush belonging to the rose family, from five to eight feet high, with small, round leaves in fascicles, and bearing a multitude of small white flowers in panicles on the ends of the upper branches.