The sunset is far more gorgeous; it often reaches grandeur. Let it be a winter evening. A suggestion of storm has been playing threats. The western hills have reached up their time-toughened arms and carried the burnt-out lantern of day to bed, tucking him away in gold-lace tapestry and rose-tinted down. Then the blue, black, and brown clouds change quickly to purple, pink, and red by turns, and the opaline sky itself forms a background for the dissolving community of interlacing filaments of priceless filigree, till in time too full of interest to compute by measure, the whole heavens are aflame with a riotous orgy of color, a prodigality of shifting scene, making one think of the descriptions essayed by the writer of the Apocalypse. We think of Moses who wished to see God "face to face," but was told he would be permitted to behold only the "dying away of his glory." No wonder the man who was forty years in the wilderness before that grand exode, and forty more through the unsurveyed deserts, was enabled to write the majestic prose-poems that have lived unaltered through all these thousands of critical years! He was in the region where inspiration is dispensed with hands of infinite wealth. God is the dispenser. SAGEBRUSH This is the forest primeval.--_Longfellow_. The continuous woods where rolls the Oregon.--_Bryant_. SAGEBRUSH Frequently within these pages mention has been made of the commonest of all our native plants on the Trail--sagebrush. Botanically, it is, _Artemisia tridentata_. The new Standard Dictionary defines sagebrush as "any one of the various shrubby species of Artemisia, of the aster family, growing on the elevated plains of the Western United States, especially _Artemisia tridentata_, very abundant from Montana to Colorado and westward." The leaf ends in three points; hence the adjective tridentata--the three-toothed artemisia. There are several varieties of sagebrush, and a person not well acquainted with the desert might easily mistake one for the other. There are the white sage, a good forage plant for sheep, and the yellow sage, which, when properly taken, can be made useful for cattle. Then there is the common variety, the sort named above. This is not to be mistaken for the prickly greasewood which infests the more alkaline regions; nor the rabbit-brush with its blossom so like the goldenrod, but with a very disagreeable odor. No man who knows will ever buy land where the greasewood grows thickly; it is unproductive because of the large percentage of alkali. But the ancient-looking sage is a pretty sure indication of fertility of soil. Mother Nature is sometimes hard pushed to find dresses for all her poorer areas; of course the better portions of the land east or west, north or south, care for their clothes better than do these arid stretches and the clothing is a richer vegetation.