The plant of which we have just been speaking is called the "Rose of Jericho," although it looks so little like a rose that quaint old John Gerard, an English doctor who loved and studied plants over three hundred years ago, says: "The coiner of the name spoiled it in the mint; for of all plants that have been written of not any are more unlike unto the rose." THE WIND WITCHES OF THE STEPPES Our own tumbleweeds and the Canada thistle have the same trick of bowling before the wind. There is a relative of these tumblers living on the Russian steppes that the Cossacks call the "wind witch." At the end of the season the branches dry up into a ball and then by the hundreds these witches go skimming over the plains, driven by the loud autumn winds. They are as light as a feather, and they go so fast that sometimes even the Cossack horsemen cannot catch them, as they often try to do in sport. Part of the time they move along with a short, quick, hopping motion, and then, caught by an eddy, rise a hundred feet in the air. Often dozens of them get locked together, join hands like the real witches of our fairy tales, and the whole company goes dancing away before the howling blast. Eery creatures! IV. The Autographs in the Sand There are certain very interesting people of the desert that you don't often find at home, not because they aren't there, but because they don't _want_ to be found. Snakes, lizards, rabbits, and ground squirrels slip quietly out of your way in the early morning, and by the time the hot sun is high, beast and bird seek the shadows of the canyons, or of big rocks, shelving banks, or caves. [Illustration: THE COYOTE'S NOCTURNE In addition to what he tells so cleverly in the picture about the night song of the Coyote, Dan Beard--_your_ Dan Beard of the Boy Scouts--says the animal is a ventriloquist; can throw his voice so that it sounds as if he were a mile off, then startle you with the noise of a full pack at your heels--and all the time be sitting watching you from behind a stone not fifty yards away! ] But they all leave word. In the lava beds of the Arizona desert, where not even the cactus will grow, you can make out the tracks of the quail and the linnet, and of a peculiar desert bird called the road-runner. There, also, are the tracks of the coyote and the wildcat, the gray wolf, and sometimes the mountain lion. If about daybreak you saw what seemed to be a long, lean, hungry dog, trotting away slantwise with a cautious eye to the rear, it was probably a gray wolf a little late in getting home. Like the coyote, the wildcat, the owl, and many other desert people, that old gray wolf belongs to the world's great night shift and is usually back in his mountain home by sunrise. Even when you see him at all--which is seldom--he is hard to make out; for, like the coyote, he wears a rusty, sunburned coat, which blends with the sand and the yellow rocks.