Here I camped, making my bed on smooth cobblestones.
[Illustration: A BEE-KEEPER'S CABIN.--BURRIELIA (ABOVE).--MADIA
(BELOW).]
Next day, in the channel of a tributary that heads on Mount San Antonio,
I passed about fifteen or twenty gardens like the one in which I
slept--lilies in every one of them, in the full pomp of bloom. My third
camp was made near the middle of the general basin, at the head of a
long system of cascades from ten to 200 feet high, one following the
other in close succession down a rocky, inaccessible canon, making a
total descent of nearly 1700 feet. Above the cascades the main stream
passes through a series of open, sunny levels, the largest of which are
about an acre in size, where the wild bees and their companions were
feasting on a showy growth of zauschneria, painted cups, and monardella;
and gray squirrels were busy harvesting the burs of the Douglas Spruce,
the only conifer I met in the basin.
The eastern slopes of the basin are in every way similar to those we
have described, and the same may be said of other portions of the range.
From the highest summit, far as the eye could reach, the landscape was
one vast bee-pasture, a rolling wilderness of honey-bloom, scarcely
broken by bits of forest or the rocky outcrops of hilltops and ridges.
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