that kind of snow. I had thought white the only natural
color of snow. I cannot think of yew trees, which I have
never seen, without thinking of Wordsworth's poem on
three yew trees.

Nobody has written a memorable poem on the mesquite.
Yet the mesquite has entered into the social, economic, and
aesthetic life of the land; it has made history and has been
painted by artists. In the homely chronicles of the Southwest
its thorns stick, its roots burn into bright coals, its trunks
make fence posts, its lovely leaves wave. To live beside this
beautiful, often pernicious, always interesting and highly
characteristic tree--or bush--and to know nothing of its
significance is to be cheated out of a part of life. It is but one
of a thousand factors peculiar to the Southwest and to the
land's cultural inheritance.

For a long time, as he tells in his _Narrative_, Cabeza de
Vaca was a kind of prisoner to coastal Indians of Texas.
Annually, during the season when prickly pear apples
(_tunas_, or Indian figs, as they are called in books) were ripe,
these Indians would go upland to feed on the fruit. During
his sojourn with them Cabeza de Vaca went along. He
describes how the Indians would dig a hole in the ground,
squeeze the fruit out of _tunas_ into the hole, and then swill
up big drinks of it. Long ago the Indians vanished, but
prickly pears still flourish over millions of acres of land. The
prickly pear is one of the characteristic growths of the Southwest.
Strangers look at it and regard it as odd. Painters look
at it in bloom or in fruit and strive to capture the colors.