Man may scratch the hillsides, but cannot mar the majesty of the mountains; they were unchanged. The map he carried was the one his father made on the spot more than a generation before. It had been well made and the specifications were minute. After a long while, carefully measuring and comparing, he found the spot to him so sacred. The juniper tree, so rare in that section, had not been disturbed by the new owner of the land, and as the precious burden, secured at last, was borne away, it still stood on guard--as if lonely now. Like father, like son. Both were faithfully bound by the strongest tie in the universe--love! THE DESERT Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. --_Gray_. As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs. --_Plutarch_. THE DESERT Much of the Old Overland Trail lay across the "Great American Desert," as it was named in the earlier geographies. Irrigation and progressive energy have made these wastes in many instances literally to "blossom as the rose"; but until that was done these stretches were weary enough. He who knows only the desert of the geography naturally conceives it an absolutely forsaken and empty region where nothing but dust-storms are born unattended and die "without benefit of the clergy." But the desert has character and is as variable as many another creature. THE SAND STORM An experience in an actual sand storm is food upon which the reminiscent may ruminate many a day, being much more pleasant in memory than in the making. First come the scurrying outriders, lithe and limber whisking gusts, dancing and whirling like Moslem dervishes, coyly brushing the traveler or boldly flinging fierce fistfuls of dirt into his eyes; then off with a swish of invisible skirts--vanishing possibly in the same direction whence they came. They go leaving him wiping his astonished eyes disgustedly, for the act was so sudden and tragic as to excite tears. Before he is aware of it other and stronger gusts duplicate the dastardly deed of the first wingless wizard of the plains, and the hapless voyager is left gasping. Almost immediately there are to be seen the regular "desert devils," as they are called, bringing a dozen or more whirling columns of yellow silt rapidly through the air, each pirouetting on one foot, assuming meanwhile all sorts of fantastic shapes.