s Charge and Other Poems._

OCTOBER 6.

When a mocking-bird looks squarely at you, not turning his head one
side, and then the other, like most birds, but showing his front face
and using both eyes at once, like an owl--when he looks squarely at you
in this way, he shows a wise, wise face. You almost believe he could
speak if he would, and you cannot resist the feeling that he is more
intelligent than he has any right to be, having behind those clear,
sharp eyes, only "blind instinct," as the wise men say.

OLIVE THORNE MILLER.

A sunset in San Juan is truly worth crossing either a continent or an
ocean to witness, when the ranges toward La Paz are purple where the
sage-brush is, and rose-color where the rains have washed the steep
places to the clay, and over all of mesa and mountain the soft glory of
golden haze.

MARAH ELLIS RYAN,
in _For the Soul of Rafael._

OCTOBER 7.

THE MOCKING BIRD.

He has an agreeable way of improving upon the original of any song he
imitates, so that he is supposed to give free music-lessons to all the
other birds. His own notes, belonging solely to himself, are beautiful
and varied, and he sandwiches them in between the rest in a way to suit
the best. No matter who is the victim of his mimicry, he loves the
corner of a chimney better than any other perch, and carols out into
the sky and down into the black abyss as if chimneys were made on
purpose for mocking-birds.

ELIZABETH AND JOSEPH GRINNELL,
in _Birds of Song and Story._

OCTOBER 8.

I love the mocking-bird; not because he is a wonderful musician,
for--as I have heard him--that he is not; nor because he has a sweet
disposition, for that he certainly has not, but because of his
mysterious habit of singing at night, which seems to differentiate him
from his kind, and approach him to the human; because of his rapturous
manner of song, his joy of living; because he shows so much character,
and so much intelligence.

OLIVE THORNE MILLER.

The lift of every man's heart is upward; to help another human soul in
its upward evolution is life's greatest and most joyful privilege; to
lend ourselves each to the other as an inspiration to grander living is
life's highest ministry and reward.

DANA W. BARTLETT,
in _The Better City._

OCTOBER 9.

THE WATER OUZEL.

The vertical curves and angles of the most precipitous torrents he
traces with the same rigid fidelity, swooping down the inclines of