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