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"Lord, spare the green and take the ripe!"" Dunsmuir called aloud, from his watch on the dam. He stood about the middle when the heart of it burst, and the lake went out in one vast arc of solid water. The better part of the work remained as a bridge, spanning the awful rupture. On that bridge he was seen one instant and then he was gone. Even as the swollen waters rent their imperfect vesture of stone and mortar, so his soul cast off its mortal lendings: the man and his work were one.

In twenty minutes from the bursting of the dam the lake was empty. And as the swollen river thrashed and sobbed and rocked itself to rest in its old channel again, that small, cold laugh was heard, distinctly syllabled, in the echo of the mournful wave that broke beneath the ruined dam.

XXI.

DOLLY walked the empty house from room to room, under festal doorways hung with flags and silly emblems, between mantels banked with flowers, breathing the sickly scent of wilted wild syringa, crowded into pots in the cold, drafty fireplaces. It was a chill spring morning, but no one had thought to build a fire. The house had a haggard, bedizened look- -a stare of homeless expectancy. In the kitchen Jenny was setting forth breakfast for the men, hastily chosen from the heaped dainties that now were funeral baked-meats. The tents and all the camp outfit were strewn for miles down the valley.

Word had come from below that Philip had signaled his safety, but could not cross, as all the boats were loose, and the ford was roaring. But toward evening he came, bringing Margaret with him; and Job's wife was a widow. They had snatched the old man in his blankets and carried him, half insensible, to the mesa, when the wave went down. He had not survived the shock and the exposure, but passed away in the night, Margaret watching by him alone, while Philip went on down the submerged valley, carrying assistance to the fleeing settlers.

No lives were lost but those two most closely bound up in the history of the work: but in the track of the wave, fields were buried and houses were gutted or swept away; and a heavy tale of damages piled up against the company, besides the immediate claims on private benevolence. It was not likely that Dunsmuir's dam would ever be forgotten. Dolly's pride was as low as the dam; but her sympathies had spread like the waters. She was sister to all who owed to them their losses. Never was she to speak of the work again without remembering that it had failed; never to boast the benefits of her father's great scheme without recalling the wave of destruction that went before. And the

promise that was given in that hour of grief and humiliation Philip might safely trust, and with his contrite joy began the work of reparation.

HARDLY had the cañon household torn down its garlands and buried its dead, when Norrisson's telegrams were signaling, east, west, and south, for men and materials for the rebuilding of the dam. And Philip's orders were to receive the stuff, and straightway to reorganize the work. When the new chief (made so by his father's command, with no words wasted) went to the manager to talk over the plan for the foundation, Norrisson replied:

"Excavate! Get down to that rock if you sink to hell. This is Dunsmuir's dam." Ánd never did Philip hear another word of acknowledgment from his father's lips. Norrisson's way was not the way of talk.

"But the high water," Philip objected.
"Turn the river over the waste-weir."
"But, great heaven, the cost!"

"I'll take care of the cost. If the Englishmen are going to lie down, let them be quick about it; I can take my bonds elsewhere. I walked the floor on that first scheme, now it 's their turn. If they want this thing, they 'll have to pay first and talk afterward."

In that crisis Philip came to know his father. The man was simply a force, devoid of memory, of conscience, or of ruth. He was nothing hampered by the past nor daunted by the future. He saw only the hole in the dam, which he swore should be stopped before the crops withered.

"You keep your hand on the throttle, and I'll shove in the coal," he said. And Philip guided, and his father fed the fires of the work. Men, teams, powder, a costly electric plant, timber, stone, mortar, and cement, were hurled into the cañon, as fuel for those fires that burned by day and by night, without one hour's cessation, till the hole in the dam was stopped-and the crops were not yet withered. And Norrisson's exultation passed all bounds: it was the measure of his previous unspoken chagrin.

"Perhaps you thought you were working up here before," he bragged to Dunsmuir's exassistant. "Now you know what I mean by work. I should have let Dunsmuir go ahead with his own plan in the first place, if I could have driven the work; but he would n't let me drive, and he would n't drive himself. If he had been in charge here now, he'd have refused to do anything till the river went down; and then our stock would have been as low as the river. No, sir; an Englishman does n't know the meaning of the word time."

Having done the work, and satisfied his pride, and boasted like the son of Tydeus, he proceeded to do honor to the vanquished dead. Out of his own pocket, as though the expense

were naught (how that pocket was filled has been hinted, but the thing could not be sworn to), he superadded to the parapet of the dam a tier of open arches on each side of the roadway from the head-works, or "poise," to the wasteweir. At the spot where Dunsmuir handed in his resignation one arch was raised above the others and converted into a niche, wherein was placed a bronze mural tablet, with a sculptured seat beneath. He did not meddle here with the design, nor did he build in haste, for he was not "placing" this work; it was his present to posterity, conceived in a spirit of reparation as extravagant as his pride.

While this demonstration was going forward in honor of her father, Dolly offered not a word. Philip understood well her silence; he felt, with her, the insolence of his father's complacent tribute to the man he had first broken and then bought. He also understood that she endured for the sake of the living what she would have rejected for the dead. Neither could he protest, and this strange offering of mixed motives added its significance to the story of the ditch.

"Fifty years from now it will not matter," Philip comforted himself. Yes; in less than fifty years, in less than five. The great dam with its crown of sculptured arches stood there as solid as the hills, the lake above, the spreading waters below, telling its own story. No one supplied the merciful omission or enforced the lesson. Jacob who tempted, Esau who sold, for that he was weary and faint with fasting long afield-the children of those very human fathers were human also; they loved, and humble love forgave what proud principle condemned. As for their world, it was busy gathering the new wealth which the waters hadsown; it had no time to think who built the ditch or how. There was the water. On a fair spring evening, when the lake holds the glory of the sky reflected in its depths, an old woman may sometimes be seen seated sidewise in the niche, supporting on her ample knee a young child who is just beginning to stand alone. He has bright hair and wonder

ful hazel-gray eyes. With his finger he follows the raised letters of the inscription; and the pair might well have been in the sculptor's mind when he designed the niche: Margaret, keeper of the past, and Philip's child, coheir and co-worker in the future.

And the words the boy will one day read are these:

TO THE MEMORY OF

ROBERT DUNSMUIR, M. INST. C. E.,
WHO DESIGNED

THESE WORKS FOR IRRIGATION,
1874-1891.

I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.

Ye shall not see wind, neither shall ye see rain; yet that valley shall be filled with water.

But Margaret takes no cognizance of these haughty promises. The text from which she reads the story of the ditch, the one she will rather teach the boy to read it by, is this:

So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth

the increase.

The ideal scheme is ever beckoning from the West; but the scheme with an ideal record is yet to find-the scheme that shall breed no murmurers, and see no recreants; that shall avoid envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; that shall fulfil its promises, and pay its debts, and remember its friends, and keep itself unspotted from the world. Over the graves of the dead, and over the hearts of the living, presses the cruel expansion of our country's material progress: the prophets are confounded, the promise withdrawn, the people imagine a vain thing. Men shall go down, the deed arrives; not unimpeachable, as the first proud word went forth, but mishandled, shorn, and stained with obloquy, and dragged through crushing strains. And those that are with it in its latter days are not those who set out in the beginning. And victory, if it come, shall border hard upon defeat.

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HEN one studies the vegetationof the western coast of the continent, it is found to be undergoing many and surprising changes. Native plants have been destroyed in some districts in order that exotic plants of commercial value might take their places. Exotic plants have escaped from cultivation, and are familiar denizens of roadsides and ravines. The soil and climate of California are so friendly to plant life that only a botanist can give a list of the species already naturalized, or another list of the species from all parts of the world that might easily become wild here if they had the chance.

Out of all this arises a curiously complex and interesting result- as if a thousand grafts of modern garden art were already set in native stocks to produce in due season more varied and wonderful results. In other States the exotic elements remain exotic, mere pot-growers in conservatories; here they have equal rights to the soil. Giant redwoods and oaks belong to the earlier wilderness, and to the California of the pioneers; but the orchards of olive and orange are the creation of an age of intensive horticulture. The border-land between realm of orchard and realm of wild forest is full of undeveloped possibilities, new forms of landscape gardening, new harmonies of plants with

architecture. One of the first planters in the Santa Clara region was wont to say, "I have given up trying to find what I can grow on my land, but I should like to know if there is anything that I cannot grow." There are, however, an infinite number of differences in the same valley, or even on the same farm, and the key to the fascinating contradictions of California plant life is to be found only in the native flora.

California astonished the botanical world long before it began to play much of a part in politics or business. Neé, the botanist, was at San Diego and Monterey a hundred years ago, and his collections are still to be seen at Madrid. Dr. Menzies, whose portfolios are partly at Kew, partly at the British Museum, spent several seasons on the coast a few years after Neé. David Douglas, one of the most devoted and successful of botanical explorers, reached the Pacific coast in 1825. Nuttall sent his herbarium to Harvard University. Pickering, Hartweg, Coulter, and others were early in the field. None of them were more typical investigators than the late Dr. C. C. Parry, who first crossed the country with the Mexican Boundary Commission. At intervals, for forty years after, he was a familiar figure to hunters, prospectors, mountaineers, and all sorts of outdoor people from the Arizona deserts to the Siskiyou pine forests.

So early were collectors in the region, and so universal was the interest felt in Europe

over the new plants of the Pacific coast, that many trees of sequoias and other superb conifers were planted in the parks of England, France, and Italy long before the discovery of gold. Wealthy Californians, as early as 1855, visiting Europe, were surprised to find how popular were the brilliant annuals, flowering shrubs, vines, and trees of their own State. Returning, they often urged neighbors to cultivate more of the native plants, but with little effect. In Alameda County, a plain, uneducated Englishwoman of Lancashire yeoman stock was one of the first persons in all California to make a home garden of wild flowers from field and hill. I remember in my boyhood the passionate devotion that she showed to this pursuit.

"It do be the best land the sun ever shone on," she declared, "for poor folk to have a garden."

The first botanists recognized many and strange contradictions in California plant life; more complete knowledge has only emphasized this feature. Very glorious are the superb flowering shrubs of the desert plateaus, such as Fouquiera, the Fremontia, and numerous acacias. Around the old missions, naturalized long ago, is the fragrant Farnese acacia of southern Europe. Agaves, cacti, palms, and yuccas grow in the Mojave and Colorado deserts, and species of conifers allied to Mexican species hang to the barren mountains. The Coast Range, the Sierras, and the great interior valley of the State present widely different botanical features from those of the extreme south or of the desert district. Little of the Rocky Mountain influence, or of that of the Puget Sound and Oregon region, is manifest in the California flora, and it is connected only remotely with the flora of the Mississippi valley or the Atlantic slope. Species of the Portulaca family are very numerous on the Pacific coast, and the Composita really seem to make the bulk of the field and hillside flowers at all seasons of the year. Next to the Composite must rank the lilies in their innumerable subdivisions. Lupines and clovers are also well represented. On the other hand, very few asters, goldenrods, lobelias, milkweeds, or gentians are found in California. It would be easy to give lists of plants whose nearest relatives are Asiatic, Mexican, or South American, and of others hardly represented outside of California; but the purpose of this paper is less technical, and more universal. It deals with those features that are most striking, and most characteristic of the region.

Chief among the native species are the conifers, and the sequoias are easily first in the class. That most painstaking investigator, Dr. Asa Gray, who gave evidence over and over again that the Pacific coast vegetation possessed for him a perennial charm, tells us in one

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of a prehistoric age, scattered as sequoia islands in the midst of hundreds of square miles of pines, cedars, and spruces.

In the minds of many lovers of forests the true redwood sequoia of the coast is a finer tree than the famous "big tree," the sequoia of the Sierra. It is almost as large as the latter, and far more graceful in stem and foliage, while its habits of growth are unique among the conifers of the world.

The redwood can be studied to advantage in three places: along the banks of mountain rivers, such as the Gualala, where it grows to an enormous size, occupying the entire valley almost to the total exclusion of other trees; in high cañons near the ocean, where the whole expanse of the redwood forest can be seen rising in slopes and terraces to the clouds; and lastly, on the rounded summits of the mountains, where the sea-fog ceases, and the outposts of the redwood forest press into the land of the oaks and the laurels. One can easily believe

of a thousand feet in circumference, and more than two hundred feet to the apex. They grow on the end of a long promontory thrust out from the golden slopes of the higher ridges to the eastward, where hosts of deciduous oaks are scattered as wisely as if planted by some landscape-gardener; the promontory drops downward in long, easy slopes, ever more and more thickly clad with yellow pine, Douglas spruce, libocedrus, and scattered redwoods, till it descends to the dark cañon's depths, black with unbroken redwood forests. Golden grass and scattered oaks shine in open vistas part way down the slope, and serve to isolate the solitary group of redwoods by a mile or two from their fellows. Young redwood-trees, sprouting from the roots, make a dense and spicy thicket about them, and half conceal the great shafts that uphold in the wilderness this shelter that an army might camp underneath.

The place is fifteen hundred feet above the sea, and, as one looks eastward, the physical

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