On our return to Blossom island, late in September, we found many of the flowers faded, but in their places there was a profusion of berries nearly as brilliant in color as the petals that heralded their coming. Many of the thickets, inconspicuous before, had then a deep, rich yellow tint, due to an abundance of luscious salmon berries, larger than our largest blackberries. The huckleberries were also ripe, and in wonderful profusion. These additions to our table were especially appreciated after living for more than a month in the snow. The ash trees were holding aloft great bunches of scarlet berries, even deeper and richer in color than the ripe leaves on the same brilliant branches. The deep woods were brilliant with the broad yellow leaves of the Devil's club, above which rose spikes of crimson berries. The dense thickets of currant bushes, so luxuriant that it was difficult to force one's way through them, had received a dusky, smoke-like tint, due to abundant blue-black strings of fruit suspended all along the under sides of the branches. * * * * * {116} Let us not look too far ahead, however. Wandering on over the sunny slopes, where the gardener has forgotten to separate the colors or to divide the flower banks, we gain the top of the island; but so dense are the plants about us, and so eager is each painted cup to expand freely in the sunlight at the expense of its neighbors, that we have to beat them down with our alpenstocks--much as we dislike to mar the beauty of the place--before we can recline on the thick turf beneath and study the strange landscape before us. The foreground of every view is a bank of flowers nodding and swaying in the wind, but all beyond is a frozen desert. The ice-fields before us, with their dark bands of débris, are a picture of desolation. The creative breath has touched only the garden which we, the first of wanderers, have invaded. The land before us is entirely without human associations. No battles have there been fought, no kings have ruled, no poets have sung of its ruggedness, and no philosopher has explained its secrets. Yet it has its history, its poetry, and its philosophy! The mountains toward the north are too near at hand to reveal their grandeur; only the borders of the vast snow-fields covering all of these upper slopes are in view. In the deep cañon with perpendicular walls, just north of our station, but curving westward so that its upper course is concealed from view, there flows a secondary glacier which forces its terminal moraine high up on the northern slope of Blossom island, but does not now join the ice-field on the south. Streams of turbid water flow from this glacier on each side of the oasis on which we stand and unite at the mouth of a dark tunnel in the ice toward the south.