With all its heat and dust the desert has its charms. The desert dust is dusty dust, but not dirty dust. Compared with the awful organic dust of New York, London, or Paris, it is inorganic and pure. On those strips of the Libyan and Arabian deserts which lie along the Nile, the desert dust is largely made up of the residuum of royalty, of withered Ptolemies, of arid Pharaohs, for the tombs of queens and kings are counted here by the hundreds, and of their royal progeny and their royal retainers by the thousands. These dessicated dynasties have been drying so long that they are now quite antiseptic. The dust of these dead and gone kings makes extraordinarily fertile soil for vegetable gardens when irrigated with the rich, thick water of the Nile. Their mummies also make excellent pigments for the brush. Rameses and Setos, Cleopatra and Hatasu--all these great ones, dead and turned to clay, are said, when properly ground, to make a rich umber paint highly popular with artists. JEROME HART, in _A Levantine Log-Book._ APRIL 10. The mountain wall of the Sierra bounds California on its eastern side. It is rampart, towering and impregnable, between the garden and the desert. From its crest, brooded over by cloud, glittering with crusted snows, the traveler can look over crag and precipice, mounting files of pines and ravines swimming in unfathomable shadow, to where, vast, pale, far-flung in its dreamy adolescence, lies California, the garden. GERALDINE BONNER, in _The Pioneer._ APRIL 11. MIRAGE IN THE MOHAVE DESERT. They hear the rippling waters call; They see the fields of balm; And faint and clear above it all, The shimmer of some silver palm That shines thro' all that stirless calm So near, so near--and yet they fall All scorched with heat and blind with pain, Their faces downward to the plain, Their arms reached toward the mountain wall. ROSALIE KERCHEVAL. APRIL 12. The desert calls to him who has once felt its strange attraction, calls and compels him to return, as the sea compels the sailor to forsake the land. He who has once felt its power can never free himself from the haunting charm of the desert. GEORGE HAMILTON FITCH, in _Palm Springs, Land of Sunshine Magazine._ IN SANCTUARY. The wind broke open a rose's heart And scattered her petals far apart. Driven before the churlish blast Some in the meadow brook were cast, Or fell in the tangle of the sedge; Some were impaled on the thorn of the hedge; But one was caught on my dear love's breast Where long ago my heart found rest. CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS, in _Overland Monthly, July_, 1907. APRIL 13.