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The acres were fairly covered with a second growth of redwood and a wealth of madroños and other native trees; but there were many spaces where Nature invited assistance, and my friend every year has planted trees of many kinds from many climes, until he has an arboretum hardly equaled anywhere.
The silk petticoats of the women, the velvet jackets and trunk hose of the men, the beautiful silk and woollen mantas, with their deep fringes of silken or woollen balls; the madroños, or silk tufts and balls, used as decorations for the Andalusian or the gypsy hats, not to mention the beautifully soft and pure silks of Barcelona, or the silk laces made in such perfection in many parts of the country, all these are objects of merchandise only needing to be known, to occasion a large demand, especially in these days when the French invention of weighted dyes floods the English market with something that has the outward appearance of silk, but which does not even wait for wear to disclose its real nature, but rots into holes on the drapers' shelves, and would-be smart young women of slender purses walk about in what has been well called "tin attire," in the manufacture of which the silk-worm has had only the slenderest interest.
SENOR DON CAPITAN, At noon to-morrow we fight in the valley near the eight oak trees and the two madronos. Do you wish to fight sooner you can come into the mountains. It will be better for us. He tore out the leaf, crawled down the mountain as non-apparently as a python, and pinned it high on an outstanding redwood, then returned and told his sentinels to sleep, replacing them with others.
The shafts of the pine and libocedrus were brown and purple, and most of the foliage was well tinged with yellow; the laurel groves, with the pale under sides of their leaves turned upward, made masses of gray; and then there was many a dash of chocolate color from clumps of manzanita, and jet of vivid crimson from the bark of the madroños; while the ground on the hillsides, appearing here and there through openings between the groves, displayed masses of pale purple and brown.
They cleared the crest and emerged from the pool as if into another world, for now they were in the thicket of velvet-trunked young madronos and looking down the open, sun-washed hillside, across the nodding grasses, to the drifts of blue and white nemophilae that carpeted the tiny meadow on either side the tiny stream. Dede clapped her hands.
The sunset fires, refracted from the cloud-driftage of the autumn sky, bathed the canyon with crimson, in which ruddy-limbed madronos and wine-wooded manzanitas burned and smoldered. The air was aromatic with laurel. Wild grape vines bridged the stream from tree to tree. Oaks of many sorts were veiled in lacy Spanish moss. Ferns and brakes grew lush beside the stream.
The madroños in the dells, with their red bark and large glossy leaves tilted every way, reflected the sunshine in throbbing spangles like those one so often sees on the rippled surface of a glacier lake. But the Silver Pines were now the most impressively beautiful of all.
A part of our work this morning will be to identify that grave. Here is the White Church." For a long distance the road had been bordered by fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madronos, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable.
A small, whitewashed farmhouse with broken windows showed through the trees. "Talk about your madronos " Billy pointed to the father of all madronos, six feet in diameter at its base, sturdy and sound, which stood before the house. They spoke in low tones as they passed around the house under great oak trees and came to a stop before a small barn. They did not wait to unharness.
The boy broke off, gazing with shocked eyes into the pit Billy had dug for him. "It's all right, sonny," Billy laughed, as he drove on. "I ain't the game warden. I 'm buyin' horses." More leaping tree squirrels, more ruddy madronos and majestic oaks, more fairy circles of redwoods, and, still beside the singing stream, they passed a gate by the roadside.
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