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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 125 Lord and Master. The largest and most wonderful flower of them all grows, I am told, on an ugly, short, misshapen cactus which, for eleven months of the year is to all outward seeming, dead, but when its roots are watered, blooms with supremely delicate and waxy pet als. There is another cactus, a low creeping plant of round trunk and pointed stem, repellent as a snake, and ugly to look upon which, at about the time of the vernal equinox, is covered wth large pink flowers, beautiful as orchids and fragrant as the fairest rose in my lady's garden. Then by the sides, and between the Mexican agaves and the white plumed yuccas with trembling serri-ated leaves, are scattered in luxuriant prodigality co lumbines, phloxes, verbenas and as many as twenty or thirty varieties of flowering plants for which my limited knowledge of botany supplies no names. Unfortunately, for the present, the names of many of these rare species are not known even to our professional botanists, and the common varieties of those which are classified, and found in other parts of California bear no such fascinat ing and gorgeous array of flowers as those indigenous to the " Pra'dera" desert. The Islands of St. George off the east coast of the Peninsula of California are a singular group of squeeze^ or lifted rocks on which the dew never settles and where rain never falls for years. These are the famous ' ' rook ery islands ' ' where, for uncounted years, enormous num bers of birds of the sea and of the land have built theif nests, deposited their eggs and hatched their young. By some mysterious law of instinct and selection the birds, from the beginning, alloted small islands and sections on the larger islands to the different species of the feather ed race, so that the sea birds, like the frigate pelicans, |