the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and precarious boulder.  Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods.  Even moisture and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature’s alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses.  It is the same, they say, in the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.  Both were plenty in our Silverado.  The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar.  Here, doubtless, came the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of Indian commerce.  Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed possession, to pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with.  But to me it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian story and Hawthornden’s allusion: 

“Desire, alas!  I desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper . . .”

Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another side to it.  Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory.  Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral.  Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the well.  The shoulder of the hill waved white with Mediterranean heath.  In the crannies of the ledge and about the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in clusters.  Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom.  Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to the sight and smell.  At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay trees filled the canyon, and the down-blowing night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into the outer air.

All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.  The madrona was here no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub; the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canyon, were not so tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them came lower than my waist.  For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where the glen was crowded with green spires.  But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we had none to envy:  our heap of road-metal was thick with bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents.  It was an endless wonder to my mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calcanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients of its perfume.  But there they all grew together, healthy, happy, and happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil.