"THE DESERT SHALL BLOSSOM AS THE ROSE."--"The 'Great American Desert' was long ago found out to be a myth; and now some of the remotest corners which were once supposed to be included in it are proving to offer the largest promises of value for agricultural and grazing purposes. In New Mexico, for example, it has long been thought that certain immense areas must always be comparatively useless because of their natural aridity. But engineers have just completed plans for tapping the Rio Grande with a canal and thus bringing under irrigation a tract some ten miles wide and a hundred and fifty long, containing nearly a million acres. The addition of so vast an area to the arable land of the Territory means, of course, a large increase in the productive resources of that section. Other canals may possibly do as much. The work of sinking artesian wells is also going on there extensively, while the project of constructing great storage reservoirs, in which the rainfall of the wet season may be collected and from thence gradually distributed through the dry season, is already in serious contemplation by private enterprise. Modern scientific irrigation has already accomplished wonders for the agriculture of Utah; it seems likely to do even more for New Mexico." LIFE AND DEATH. 122 YEARS.--The great-grandfather of the dramatist Steele Mackaye, named John Morrison, was an old Covenanter and preached in the same parish a hundred years. He lived to be 122. His name, written in the old Bible after he was a centenarian, looks like a copperplate. 154 YEARS.--The Cincinnati _Evening Telegram_ recently published a special from San Antonio, Tex., which says: News has just reached here, from a most reliable source, of the recent death in the State of Vera Cruz, Mex., of Jesus Valdonado, a farmer and ranchman of considerable possessions. This man's age at the time of death was indisputably 154 years. At Valdonado's funeral the pall-bearers were his three sons, aged respectively 140, 120, and 109 years. They were white-haired, but strong and hearty, and in full possession of all their faculties. AMERICUS, Ga., Sept. 25.--Edmond Montgomery died on Nick Jordan's place, near the county line of Schley, aged 102 years. He was an African chief of the Askari tribe, and was taken to Virginia from Africa in 1807, when he was a young man. He had a large family in Virginia, and when he died he left his third wife and 25 children in Georgia. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren are unknown and unnumbered. He had remarkably good eyesight and health, and never took a dose of medicine in his life.