Few forms of plant life present to the beholder more beautiful characteristics than an Orange tree in full bearing. Such a tree, in addition to the unripe and ripe yellow fruit has also numerous white flowers, which give off their wonderful perfume, and its symmetrically arranged branches are covered with rich dark green leaves. It is a tree that appeals not alone to the sense of taste but to the esthetic nature as well. THE MUSICAL SWAN. (_Cygnus musicus._) “What moonlit glades, what seas, Foam-edged, have I not known! Through ages hath not flown Mine ancient song with gathered music sweet— By fanes o’erthrown, By cities known of old, and classic woods, And, strangely sad, in deep-leaved northern solitudes?” If those living Avian gems aglow amid the trees that form Earth’s emerald diadem, are the jewels of Nature’s crown, then is the great white swan afloat upon the ripples of her glistening lakes and seas, a shimmering pearl amid the chasing of her silver breastplate. Yet it was not the beautiful Mute Swan, most beautiful, most stately, and most silent of all created beings, that typified to the men of old the reincarnation of the poet’s soul; neither the Trumpeter, with its loud clarion, but the more slender Singing Swan of song and story, that “thro’ its deathless music sent a dying moan.” It was to this swan alone that the ancients could attribute the power of melody—the singular faculty of tuning its dying dirge from among the reedy marshes of its final retreat, where “in a low, plaintive and stridulous voice, in the moment of death, it murmured forth its last prophetic sigh;” and it was this swan, too, that inspired the philosopher Pythagoras to teach that the souls of poets passed at death into swans and retained the powers of harmony they had possessed in their human forms. M. Antoine thinks that it is not improbable that the popular and poetical notion of the singing of the swan was derived from the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; yet the traveler Pausanius, who spake as one having authority, affirmed the swan to be “the glory of music,” at the same time preserving the following testimony to the repute of the swan as a bird of prophecy: “In the night before Plato was to become the pupil of Sokrates, the latter in a dream saw a swan take refuge in his bosom. Now the swan has a reputation for music, because a man who loved music very much, Kuknos, the king of the Ligyes beyond the Eridanus, is said to have ruled the land of the Kelts. People relate concerning him that, through the will of Apollo, he was changed after his death into a swan.” From this evidence Pausanius thus subtracts the weight of his private opinion: “I am willing to believe that a man who loved music may have ruled over the Ligyes, but that a human being was turned into a bird is a thing impossible for me to believe.”