mpossible.

Man may scratch the hillsides, but cannot mar the majesty of the
mountains; they were unchanged. The map he carried was the one his
father made on the spot more than a generation before. It had been
well made and the specifications were minute. After a long while,
carefully measuring and comparing, he found the spot to him so sacred.
The juniper tree, so rare in that section, had not been disturbed by
the new owner of the land, and as the precious burden, secured at
last, was borne away, it still stood on guard--as if lonely now. Like
father, like son. Both were faithfully bound by the strongest tie in
the universe--love!

THE DESERT

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
--_Gray_.

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of
their maps parts of the world which they do not
know about, adding notes in the margin to the
effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy
deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable
bogs.
--_Plutarch_.

THE DESERT

Much of the Old Overland Trail lay across the "Great American Desert,"
as it was named in the earlier geographies. Irrigation and progressive
energy have made these wastes in many instances literally to "blossom
as the rose"; but until that was done these stretches were weary
enough.

He who knows only the desert of the geography naturally conceives it
an absolutely forsaken and empty region where nothing but dust-storms
are born unattended and die "without benefit of the clergy." But the
desert has character and is as variable as many another creature.

THE SAND STORM

An experience in an actual sand storm is food upon which the
reminiscent may ruminate many a day, being much more pleasant in
memory than in the making. First come the scurrying outriders, lithe
and limber whisking gusts, dancing and whirling like Moslem
dervishes, coyly brushing the traveler or boldly flinging fierce
fistfuls of dirt into his eyes; then off with a swish of invisible
skirts--vanishing possibly in the same direction whence they came.
They go leaving him wiping his astonished eyes disgustedly, for the
act was so sudden and tragic as to excite tears. Before he is aware of
it other and stronger gusts duplicate the dastardly de