rest gold on Arizona's literary field, that was found by the
genius of a lonesome valley's queen, the song-lark of our "Great
Southwest."

From the sheltering tree of her ancestral hall shyly she fluttered
forth.

Among stony crags of the sierra, on fearsome dizzy trails, in the
somber shadows of virgin forests, in the rustling of wind-blown leaves
(the seductive swish of elfin skirts) she heard the voices of Juno's
sylvan train. Enchanted she listened to the syren's call, and ere the
echo died within her ear she had devoted her talent to literature, a
priestess self-ordained in Arizona's temple of the muses.

In the flight of her poetic mind she met his majesty, king of the
hills, the mountain-lion at the threshold of his lair and toyed with
his cubs, princes and heirs to freedom.

She heard the were-wolf scourge of herds, fierce lobos snarl in silent
groves of timber and shivered at the coyote's piercing yelps from grave
yards in the valleys.

At nighttime, in her lonely camp the dread tarantela disturbed her rest
and in day's early gloam a warning rattle of creepy serpents sounded
her reveille:

"Fair maid, awake, arise in haste! When darkness vanishes with dawn,
heed our alarm-clock in the morn!"

She spoke not to the sullen bear, in cautious silence passed him by and
shunned the fetid breath of monster lizards and venom stings of
centipedes and scorpions; but woman-like she feared the
hydrophobia-skunk more for its scent than for its deadly poison.

She heeded not the half-tamed Indian on the trail; but the insolent
leer of Sonora's scum, the brutalized peon, the low caste chulo of
Chihuahua, froze into the panic-stare of abject terror under the
straight glance of her eye. The slightest motion of her tender hand to
him augured a sudden death, for she was of Arizona's daughters,
invulnerable in the armor of their self-reliant strength, a shield of
lovely innocence, white as the snow is driven.

On the Mesa del Mogollon, in the darkling Coconino Forest she
interviewed the cowboy, that valiant belted knight of modern western
chivalry, and in the chaparral she cheered the lonesome herder.

In the treasure-vaults of earth, a thousand feet below the surface,
invading the domain of Pluto's treacherous gnomes she met the hardiest
man in Arizona, the miner, who always happy is and full of hope.

Poor fellows, they hobnob with death and do not mind it!

Floods of rivers, cloudbursts in narrow gorges, the light