Himself thrusts gun to elbow-place
And peers amid the dust-dressed sage
And scented chaparral so dense,
To glimpse the fiery eyeballs
Of the prowler of the hills;
While all awatch the faithful collies stand
Prepared to fend e'en with their lives
The young and helpless not their own.

THE FEATHERED DRUMMER

The wooded thicket holds a drum.
The air in springtime afternoons
Is filled with sharp staccato notes
Whose echoes clear reverberate
From precipice and timbered hills.
No fifer plays accompaniment;
No pageant proud or marching throng
Keeps step to this deep pulsing bass
Whose sullen solo booms afar.

A double challenge is this gage,
A gauntlet flung for love or war;
As strutting barnyard chanticleer
Defies his neighboring lord:
So calls this crested pheasant-king
For combat or for peace.
The meek brown mate upon her nest
Feels happy and secure
While thus her lord by deed and word
Displays his woodland bravery
And guards their little home.

MORMONDOM

That fellow seems to possess but one idea, and that is the wrong
one.--_Samuel Johnson_.

Utah is harder than China.--_Bishop Wiley_.

Utah is the hardest soil into which the Methodist plowshare was
ever set.--_Bishop Fowler_.

THE TRAIL OF THE MORMON

By the Trail had gone Jason Lee, in 1834, to plant the sturdy oak of
Methodism in the Willamette Valley and the north Pacific Coast. His
task was nobly done; the developments of to-day attest the wisdom of
the church in sending him and his coequal coadjutors, Daniel Lee,
Cyrus Shepherd, and P. L. Edwards.

Over this same track went Marcus Whitman, in 1835, to found the
mission at Waiilatpu, near the present site of Walla Walla, and to
find there the early grave of honorable martyrdom at the hands of the
people he was attempting to save. The call to these two intrepid
equals, Lee and Whitman, came through the visit of the two young
Indian chiefs who, immediately after the expedition of Lewis and
Clark, had gone to Saint Louis to obtain a