cup-like blossom. I hear that at Catalina the goats, deprived of their
natural pabulum of hoop-skirts, tomato cans, and old shoes, feed on
clover and drink the dew.

That's what this climate does for a goat. I do not dare to make many
statements in regard to novelties in natural history since one poor
woman poetized upon the coyote "howling" in the desert, and roused
hundreds of critics to deny that coyotes ever howled. And a scientific
student came to Santa Barbara not so long ago, and found on one of these
islands a species of tailless fox, and hastened to communicate the
interesting anomaly to the Smithsonian Institute. It seems that the
otter hunters trapped these foxes for their tails, then let them go.

If it were not for these blunders I would state that roosters seem to
keep awake most of the night in Southern California, and can be heard
crowing at most irregular hours. Considering the risks, I refrain.

The islands were named by a pious priest, who made the map; and those we
see in looking out from Santa Barbara are San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa
Cruz, Ana, Capa. San Nicholas Island is interesting as having been the
abode for sixteen years of a solitary Indian woman, a feminine Robinson
Crusoe, without even a Friday, who was left by mistake when the rest of
the Indians were carried away by order of the Mission Fathers. Two of
the men who at last succeeded in finding her gave their testimony, which
has been preserved; and one of them, Charlie Brown, is still alive, and
likes to tell the strange story. It seems she had run back to get her
child, and the ship went off without her. Nidever tells his story in
this way:

"We scattered off two or three hundred yards apart. She had a little
house made of brush and had a fire; she was sitting by the fire with a
little knife; she was working with it. She had a bone; all came up and
looked at her; she had a heap of roots--that is what she lived on--and
had little sacks to carry them in. As soon as we sat down she put a lump
of them to roast on the fire. Finally we got ready to go, and we made
signs for her to come with us. She understood the signs for her to come
with us; she picked up her things to take them on board."

She had a dress made of duck skins, sewed together with the sinews of a
seal, with needles made of bone--an eye drilled through. This dress the
priests sent to Rome.

The demijohn in which she carried water was made out of rushes and
stopped with as