For through this realm enchanted, wanderers stroll— Or from the Seven Seas, or dwellers near— And cares forget, while from each weary soul Life’s heavy burden slips—till peace reigns here Where blue sky arches over flower and palm, And west winds whispering, breathe a healing balm. Here creep the old and sad, so long denied The welcoming smile these sunny spaces hold; Fond lovers weave their golden dreams beside Gay, laughing children counting poppy gold; To all the Park brings rest, and sweet relief From work or pain, or haunting wraiths of grief. —_Ella M. Sexton._ YERMAH, THE DORADO THE STORY OF A LOST RACE CHAPTER ONE Yermah, the Dorado, was refreshed and invigorated by his early morning ride. It had been a voluntary gallop, and it would have been hard to say which found the keenest enjoyment in it; he, his horse Cibolo, or Oghi the ocelot, which ran beside them in long, slow leaps, covering much ground yet always alighting noiselessly and as softly as a cat. It was a beautiful morning, one that would correspond to the first of June now—but this was in the long ago, when days and months were reckoned differently. The tall grass and wild oats left ample proof of close proximity along the roadside by the fragments secreted in the clothing of Yermah and in the trappings of Cibolo. Oghi, too, could have been convicted on the evidence his formidable toes presented. Added to this was the indescribable scent of dew, of the first hours of day and the springtime of nature. It was the first time since his arrival from Atlantis that Yermah had ventured alone outside the city limits. When once the temples, and marketplaces of Tlamco were left behind him, he had given Cibolo the rein and abandoned himself to the exhilaration of going like the wind. Tlamco, the Llama city, the name of which was unknown to the men who sought the mythical Kingdom of Quivera—that will-o’-the wisp land—supposed to be the center of the Amazon inhabited island of California of the very remote past. Tlamco vanished so completely that there were no traces perceptible to the men who founded Yerba Buena on the same peninsula ages after. Its existence would be laughed at by present day inhabitants of San Francisco were it not true that the hills in and around Golden Gate Park are living witnesses of great mathematical skill. The first denizens built some of these hills and shaped others to give the diameters and distances of all the planets. Who of to-day will believe that Las Papas, or Twin Peaks, show the eccentricities of the earth’s orbit to one fifty-millionths of its full size?