s Yuma--there the temperature rose ten degrees
hotter than hades; but luckily since then it has cooled off as much.

The happy maiden smiled with joy as Apollo kissed her long and often.
He took the turquoise from the skies, an emblem of unfaltering faith.
It and a lock of shining hair he gave her. That hid she in her rocky
bed where it became gold of the mint; the filthy lucre of unworthiness
and avarice, a blessing when in charity bestowed; a boon as the reward
of honest labor!

With lengthening shadows Luna, night's gentle goddess came, a full mile
nearer to Arizona than to other lands beaming her softest rays over the
sleeping child. Under the lunar kisses woke Arizona and stored the
moonshine in her gown. That nature has transformed to silver; serving
the poor man as his needed coin.

In sadness waned the moon, for caught between the horns of a dilemma
she had no wealth left to endow the infant with. Intemperate habits had
the goddess always, was often full and now reduced to her last quarter,
but that was waning fast and her man's shadow also growing less. Her
semi-transparent stone, alas! had given she long since to California,
but this proudest of all daughters of the seas did not appreciate the
kindly gift. She cast it on the white sands of her beaches where it is
gathered by the thankful tourist who shouts exultantly, delighted with
his find:

The moonstone, climate, atmosphere,
The only things free-gratis here--
Eureka!
I have found!

A ROYAL FIASCO.

(HISTORICAL ANECDOTES.)

A village on the coast of northern Germany, where the Elbe flows into
the North Sea, was my birthplace, its parsonage, my childhood's home.

Two great earth-dikes which sheltered our village from fierce
southwesterly gales were the only barrier standing between untold
thousands of lives and watery graves, for the coasts of Holland and
northern Germany are below the level of high tides.

It is known that through inundations caused by breaks in these levees,
occurring as late as the tenth and eleventh centuries of our era more
than three hundred thousand persons with all their domestic cattle were
drowned over night.

These dikes which extend for many miles along the banks of the river
were erected by the systematic herculean toil of generations of our
ancestors.

According to a popular tradition it was Rolof, the dwarf, a thrall of
Vulcan, who taught my forefathers the art of forging tools from iron
ore, e