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A Summer in a Canyon by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
page 47 of 218 (21%)
with a gay canopy, twenty feet square. Three sides were made by
hanging full curtains of awning cloth from redwood rods by means of
huge brass rings. These curtains were looped back during the day and
dropped after dark, making a cosy and warm interior from which to
watch the camp-fire on cool evenings.

As for the Canyon de Las Flores itself, this little valley of the
flowers, it was beautiful enough in every part to inspire an artist's
pencil or a poet's pen; so quiet and romantic it was, too, it might
almost have been under a spell,--the home of some sleepy, enchanted
princess waiting the magic kiss of a princely lover. It reached from
the ocean to the mountains, and held a thousand different pictures on
which to feast the eye; for Dame Nature deals out beauty with a
lavish hand in this land of perpetual summer, song, and sunshine.
There were many noble oak-trees, some hung profusely with mistletoe,
and others with the long, Spanish greybeard moss, that droops from
the branches in silvery lines, like water spray. Sometimes, in the
moonlight, it winds about the oak like a shroud, and then again like
a filmy bridal veil, or drippings of mist from a frozen tree.

Here and there were open tracts of ground between the clumps of
trees, like that in which the tents were pitched,--sunny places,
where the earth was warm and dry, and the lizards blinked sleepily
under the stones.

Farther up the canyon were superb bay-trees, with their glossy leaves
and aromatic odour, and the madrono, which, with its blood-red skin,
is one of the most beautiful of California trees, having an open
growth, like a maple, bright green lustrous leaves, and a brilliant
red bark, which peels off at regular seasons, giving place to a new
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