ping leafage against
the azure of a cloudless sky--a wonderful touch of Egypt and the East
to surroundings typical of the American Far West.

EDMUND MITCHELL,
in _In Desert Keeping._

The noblest life--the life of labor;
The noblest love--the love of neighbor.

LORENZO SOSSO,
in _Wisdom for the Wise._

JULY 9.

THE LIVE OAKS AT MENLO PARK.

The road wound for some half mile through a stretch of uncultivated
land, dotted with the forms of huge live-oaks. The grass beneath them
was burnt gray and was brittle and slippery. The massive trees, some
round and compact and so densely leaved that they were impervious to
rain as an umbrella, others throwing out long, gnarled arms as if
spellbound in some giant throe of pain, cast vast slanting shadows
upon the parched ground. Some seemed, like trees in Dore's drawings,
to be endowed with a grotesque, weird humanness of aspect, as though
an imprisoned dryad or gnome were struggling to escape, causing the
mighty trunk to bow and writhe, and sending tremors of life along each
convulsed limb. A mellow hoariness marked them all, due to their own
richly subdued coloring and the long garlands of silvery moss that
hung from their boughs like an old, rich growth of hair.

GERALDINE BONNER,
in _Tomorrow's Tangle._

JULY 10.

MADRONA.

No other of our trees, to those who know it in its regions of finest
development, makes so strong an appeal to man's imagination--to his
love of color, of joyful bearing, of sense of magic, of surprise and
change. He walks the woods in June or July and rustles the mass of
gold-brown leaves fresh fallen under foot, or rides for unending weeks
across the Mendocino ranges--and always with a sense of fresh interest
and stimulation at the varying presence of this tree.

W.L. JEPSON,
in _Trees of California._

JULY 11.

THE WOODS OF THE WEST.

Oh, woods of the west, leafy woods that I love.
Where through the long days I have heard
The prayer of the wind in the branches above,
And the tremulous song of the bird.
Where the clust'ring blooms of the dog-wood hang o'er--
White stars in the dusk of the pine,
And down the dim aisles of the old forest pour
The sunbeams that melt into wine!

* * * * *

Oh, woods of the west, I am sighing today
For the sea-songs your voices repeat,
For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away
From the stifling air of