scarlet crest. From the safe height of a saber, monkeys showered
vituperations upon them. Once an _iguana_, great chameleon
lizard, rose under foot and dashed for the nearest water; again a
python wound its slow length across the path. Vegetation was equally
gorgeous, always strange. He saw plants that stung more bitterly than
insects; insects barely distinguishable from plants. Here a tree bore
flowers instead of leaves; there flowers grew as large as trees. * * *
Birds, beasts, flowers--all were strange, all were wonderful.

HERMAN WHITAKER,
in _The Planter._



JULY 26.


Sitting in the white-paved pergola at Montecito. with overhead a leafy
shelter of pink-flowered passifloras, looking out over the little
lake, its surface dotted with water-lilies, its banks fringed with
drooping shrubs and vines, the hum of the bee and the bird in the
air--I looked down over a wonderful collection of nearly 200 rare
palms and listened to the music that floated up from their waving
branches like that of a thousand silken-stringed eolian harp; and
there came into my mind visions of a people that shall be strong with
the strength of great hills, calm with the calm of a fair sea, united
as are at last the palm and the pine, mighty with the presence of God.

BELLE SUMNER ANGIER,
in _The Garden Book of California._