The saloons were crowded, and card games were in progress, with gold
coins stacked at the corners of the tables. Out of doors some red-faced
fellows were running races in the streets and shouting like wild
Indians. Over the door of a restaurant was the sign "Eat, Drink, and Be
Merry," and the youth pondered the words of Scripture following these
festive words, but not quoted by the enterprising proprietor.
He remembered now, after nineteen years, the strange aspect of nature in
this strange land. What great mountains! What deep canons! What huge
pines, with cones as large as a rolling-pin! The strange manzanita
bushes, the chaparral, the buck-eye with its plumes, the fragrant
mountain lily, like an Easter lily, growing wild. It had seemed good to
him, a stranger in this strange land, to see old friends in the
squirrels that scampered through the woods and crossed his path, to find
alders, and blossoming dog-wood, the mountain brake, and his childhood's
friend the mullen stalk. Even to this day when he came upon an orchid,
or a wild rose, with its small pink petals (smaller in this red sterile
soil than in his native country), or when a humming bird in its shining
plumage came to sip honey from the flowers, or when in the still woods
he heard the liquid notes of a hermit thrush, the romance and the
reverence of youth thrilled him.
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