ARTHUR W. NORTH,
in The Mother of California.

JANUARY 7.

CALIFORNIA.

  A sleeping beauty, hammock-swung,
    Beside the sunset sea,
  And dowered with riches, wheat, and oil,
    Vineyard and orange tree;
  Her hand, her heart to that fair prince
    Whose genius shall unfold
  With rarest art her treasured tales
    Of life and love and gold.

CLARENCE URMY,
in A Vintage of Verse.

JANUARY 8.

BACK TO CALIFORNIA.

To the Californian born, California is the only place to live.  Why do men so love their native soil?  It is perhaps a phase of the human love for the mother.  For we are compact of the soil.  Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—­out of the earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—­out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone.  Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, love their mountain birthplace?  Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return?  And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—­back to the soil which gave us birth—­and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.

JEROME A. HART,
in Argonaut Letters.

JANUARY 9.

GIVE ME CALIFORNY.

  Blizzard back in York state
    Sings its frosty tune,
  Here the sun a-shinin’,
    Air as warm as June. 
  Snow in Pennsylvany,
    Zero times down East,
  Here the flowers bloomin’,
    A feller’s eyes to feast.

* * * * *

  Its every one his own way,
    The place he’d like to be,
  But give me Californy—­
    It’s good enough for me.

JOHN S. MCGROARTY,
in Just California.

JANUARY 10.

If Mother Nature is indeed as we see her here, broad-browed and broad-bosomed, strong and calm—­calm because strong—­swaying her vain brats by unruffled love, not by fear; by wise giving, not by privation; by caresses and gentle precepts, not by cuffs and scoldings and hysterics—­why, then she shall better justify our memories and the name we have given her.  It is well that our New England mothers had a different climate in their hearts from that which beat at their windows.  I know one Yankee boy who never could quite understand that his mother had gone home till he came to know the skies of California.

CHARLES F. LUMMIS, in The Right Hand of the Continent, Out West, June, 1902.