ts chalice white;
The myriad ferns hang draperies soft and white
Thick on each mossy bank and watered steep,
Where slender deer tread softly in the night--
Down in the redwood canyons dark and deep.

LILLIAN H. SHUEY,
in _Among the Redwoods._

MARCH 22.

You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy and gradually
ascending creek-bed of a canyon, a half hour of laboring steepness in
the overarching mountain lilac and laurel. There you came to a great
rock gateway which seemed the top of the world. * * * Beyond the
gateway a lush level canyon into which you plunged as into a bath;
then again the laboring trail, up and always up toward the blue
California sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chaparral
into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the
fine angular shale of the upper regions. Beyond the apparent summit
you found always other summits yet to be climbed, and all at once,
like thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you looked over the
top.

STEWART EDWARD WHITE,
in _The Mountains._

MARCH 23.

DONNER LAKE.

So fair thou art--so still and deep--
Half hidden in thy granite cup.
From depths of crystal smiling up
As smiles a woman in her sleep!

The pine trees whisper where they lean
Above thy tide; and, mirrored there
The purple peaks their bosoms bare,
Reflected in thy silver sheen.

So fair thou art! And yet there dwells
Within thy sylvan solitudes
A memory which darkling broods
And all thy witchery dispels.

DANIEL S. RICHARDSON,
in _Trail Dust._

MARCH 24.

DONNER LAKE.

Donner Lake a pleasure resort! Can you understand for one moment how
strange this seems to me? I must be as old as Haggard's "She," since I
have lived to see our papers make such a statement. It is years since
I was there, yet I can feel the cold and hunger and hear the moan of
the pines; those grand old trees that used to tell me when a storm was
brewing and seemed to be about the only thing there alive, as the snow
could not speak. But now that the place is a pleasure resort--the moan
of the pines should cease.

VIRGINIA REED MURPHY.

MARCH 25.

THE LURE OF THE DESERT LAND.

Have you slept in a tent alone--a tent
Out under the desert sky--
Where a thousand thousand desert miles
All silent 'round you lie?
The dust of the aeons of ages dead,
And the peoples that tramped by!

* *