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These ordinances, after enjoining a general kind treatment of the natives, recommend that small pieces of land be assigned to them on which to cultivate corn, yucca, cotton, etc., and raise fowls for their own maintenance. The "encomendero," or master, was to construct four rustic huts for every 50 Indians.
Joost had brought several small presents besides the crochet hook, a pipe for his father, and two other trifles a small vase and a photograph of a plant which was the pride of the Berlin gardens that year an aloe, no yucca, but one of the true rare blooming sort, in full flower.
Louise, impelled to dreams by the languorous warm night and Boyar's easy stride up the steep, touched his neck with the rein and turned him into the Old Meadow Trail. The tall, slender stems of the yucca and infrequent clumps of dwarfed cacti cast clear-edged shadows on the bare, moonlit ground. Boyar, sniffing, suddenly swung up and pivoted, his fore feet hanging over sheer black emptiness.
The Spanish bayonet, with its long stalk of white, waxy blossoms, presents a very beautiful appearance, as do also the young specimens of the tree yucca. At rare intervals, once perhaps in many years, there is an unusual amount of rainfall in the spring, and in a few weeks the desert becomes transformed as if by magic.
§ II. Cotton, which grows well in New Mexico and Arizona, the tough fibers of yucca leaves and the fibers of other plants, the hair of different quadrupeds, and the down of birds furnished in prehistoric days the materials of textile fabrics in this country.
With little labor the cultivation of their patches of yucca required was performed by the women, and beyond the construction of their canoes and the carving of some battle club, they knew no industry, except, perhaps, the chipping of some stone into the rude likeness of a man, or of one of the few animals they knew.
The chaparral and yucca and yerba buena gave place to pine-trees and mountain oaks, with little close clumps of cottonwoods in the stream bottom. The brook narrowed and leaped, and the white of alkali faded from its banks. We began to climb in good earnest, pausing often for breath. The view opened.
What the poor creatures who wandered over those dreary wastes could find to eat was a problem to be solved only by close observation of their ways. "H. H." said some years ago that the magnificent yucca, the glory of the Colorado mesas, was being exterminated by wandering cows, who ate the buds as soon as they appeared.
Blending their foliage with these fair indigenes are an hundred lovely exotics the orange, lemon, and fig; the Indian-lilac and tamarind; olives, myrtles, and bromelias; while the Babylonian willow contrasts its drooping fronds with the erect reeds of the giant cane, or the lance-like blades of the yucca gloriosa.
Ned did not know that time could be so long. He had not been watching more than three or four hours, and yet it seemed like as many days. But it was not long until dawn, and then it would be time for them to be up and away again. The horses reposed by the yucca, and, down the far side of the swell, close to the bottom of the dip, was another yucca.
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