the rainbow would covet.

In the opposite direction a morning mirage inverts an image of a
stretch of trees along the far-away river and blends them top to
top till they seem greenish-black columns supporting the dun clouds
of the west, while the belated moon peers through the half-unreal
corridors.

SUNSET

The sunset is far more gorgeous; it often reaches grandeur. Let it be
a winter evening. A suggestion of storm has been playing threats. The
western hills have reached up their time-toughened arms and carried
the burnt-out lantern of day to bed, tucking him away in gold-lace
tapestry and rose-tinted down. Then the blue, black, and brown clouds
change quickly to purple, pink, and red by turns, and the opaline sky
itself forms a background for the dissolving community of interlacing
filaments of priceless filigree, till in time too full of interest to
compute by measure, the whole heavens are aflame with a riotous orgy
of color, a prodigality of shifting scene, making one think of the
descriptions essayed by the writer of the Apocalypse.

We think of Moses who wished to see God "face to face," but was told
he would be permitted to behold only the "dying away of his glory." No
wonder the man who was forty years in the wilderness before that grand
exode, and forty more through the unsurveyed deserts, was enabled to
write the majestic prose-poems that have lived unaltered through all
these thousands of critical years! He was in the region where
inspiration is dispensed with hands of infinite wealth. God is the
dispenser.

SAGEBRUSH

This is the forest primeval.--_Longfellow_.

The continuous woods where rolls the Oregon.--_Bryant_.

SAGEBRUSH

Frequently within these pages mention has been made of the commonest
of all our native plants on the Trail--sagebrush. Botanically, it is,
_Artemisia tridentata_. The new Standard Dictionary defines sagebrush
as "any one of the various shrubby species of Artemisia, of the aster
family, growing on the elevated plains of the Western United States,
especially _Artemisia tridentata_, very abundant from Montana to
Colorado and westward." The leaf ends in three points; hence the
adjective tridentata--the three-toothed artemisia.

There are several varieties of sagebrush, and a person not well
acquainted with the desert might easily mistake one for the other.
There are the white sage, a good forage plant for sheep, and the
yellow sage, w