JULY 8. The scene was a ravine that had been cloven into the flank of a mighty mountain as if by the stroke of a giant's axe. For about half a mile this gash ran sharp and narrow; but at the upper end, the resting place of the travelers, it widened into a spacious amphitheatre, dotted with palm trees that rose with clean cylindrical boles sixty to eighty feet before spreading their crowns of drooping leafage against the azure of a cloudless sky--a wonderful touch of Egypt and the East to surroundings typical of the American Far West. EDMUND MITCHELL, in _In Desert Keeping._ The noblest life--the life of labor; The noblest love--the love of neighbor. LORENZO SOSSO, in _Wisdom for the Wise._ JULY 9. THE LIVE OAKS AT MENLO PARK. The road wound for some half mile through a stretch of uncultivated land, dotted with the forms of huge live-oaks. The grass beneath them was burnt gray and was brittle and slippery. The massive trees, some round and compact and so densely leaved that they were impervious to rain as an umbrella, others throwing out long, gnarled arms as if spellbound in some giant throe of pain, cast vast slanting shadows upon the parched ground. Some seemed, like trees in Dore's drawings, to be endowed with a grotesque, weird humanness of aspect, as though an imprisoned dryad or gnome were struggling to escape, causing the mighty trunk to bow and writhe, and sending tremors of life along each convulsed limb. A mellow hoariness marked them all, due to their own richly subdued coloring and the long garlands of silvery moss that hung from their boughs like an old, rich growth of hair. GERALDINE BONNER, in _Tomorrow's Tangle._ JULY 10. MADRONA. No other of our trees, to those who know it in its regions of finest development, makes so strong an appeal to man's imagination--to his love of color, of joyful bearing, of sense of magic, of surprise and change. He walks the woods in June or July and rustles the mass of gold-brown leaves fresh fallen under foot, or rides for unending weeks across the Mendocino ranges--and always with a sense of fresh interest and stimulation at the varying presence of this tree. W.L. JEPSON, in _Trees of California._ JULY 11. THE WOODS OF THE WEST. Oh, woods of the west, leafy woods that I love. Where through the long days I have heard The prayer of the wind in the branches above, And the tremulous song of the bird. Where the clust'ring blooms of the dog-wood hang o'er-- White stars in the dusk of the pine, And down the dim aisles of the old forest pour The sunbeams that melt into wine! * * * * *