T.S.  VAN DYKE,
in Southern California.

AUGUST 4.

You who would find a new delight in the wild and waste places of the earth, a new meaning to life, and an enlarged sympathy with your fellow creatures, should seek them out, not in the books, but in their homes.  One bird learned and known as an individual creature, with a life all its own, is worth volumes of reading.  Listen to their call-notes; observe their plumage and their motions; seek out their homes, and note their devotion to their young.  Then will the lower animals become invested with a new dignity, and the homes builded not with hands will become as sacred as the dwelling-place of your neighbor.

CHARLES KEELER,
in Bird Notes Afield.

AUGUST 5.

THE NAVEL ORANGE 250 YEARS AGO.

Most Americans know an orange by sight, and we of California count it a blood relation.  We do grow the best orange in the world, and ship thousands of loads of it in a year; and we have a modest notion that we invented it, and that we “know oranges.”  But the handsomest, the fullest and the most erudite treatise on oranges ever printed does not derive from California, nor yet from the Only Smart Nation....  On the contrary, it was printed in Rome in the year 1646....  More accurate drawings of these fruits have never been printed; and the illustrations cover not only the varieties and even the “freaks” of the Golden Apple, but the methods of planting, budding, wall-training and housing it.  Perhaps the point likeliest to jar our complacent ignorance is the fact that this venerable work describes and pictures seedless oranges, and even the peculiar “sport,” now an established variety, which we know as the “Navel.”  Two hundred and fifty seven years ago it was called the “Female, or Foetus-bearing orange;” but no one today can draw a better picture, nor a more unmistakable, of a navel orange.

CHARLES F. LUMMIS,
in Out West.

AUGUST 6.

THE SIERRA NEVADAS.

  Serene and satisfied!  Supreme!  As lone
  As God, they loom like God’s archangels churl’d;
  They look as cold as kings upon a throne;

* * * * *

  A line of battle-tents in everlasting snow.

JOAQUIN MILLER.

AUGUST 7.

TO THE VIOLET.

  Welcome little violet,
  I gladly welcome thee;
  Peeping with thy dewy eyes
  So shyly out at me.

  Modest little violet
  Hide not thy face away. 
  I love thee and thy sweet perfume,
  Thy purple-hued array.

  Sweetest little violet,
  I’ll pluck thee gently dear,
  I’ll nurture thee so tenderly—­
  Then have of me no fear.