AUGUST 27.

THE SIERRA SNOW-PLANT.

  Thou growest in eternal snows
    As flower never grew;
  The sun upon thy beauty throws
    No kiss—­the dawn no dew.

  Thou knowest not the love-warm marl
    Of Earth, but dead and white
  The wastes wherein thy roots ensnarl
    Ere thou art freed in light.

  Where blighted dawns, with twilight blent,
    Die pale, thou liftest strong,
  A tongue of crimson, eloquent
    With one unceasing song.

  O Life in vasts of death!  O Flame
    That thrills the stark expanse;
  Let Love and Longing be thy name! 
    Love and Renunciance.

HERMAN SCHEFFAUER,
in Looms of Life.

AUGUST 28.

IN A CALIFORNIA GARDEN.

  Thro’ the green cloister, folding us within. 
  The leaves are audible—­our ear to win;
  They whisper of the realm of old Romance. 
  Of sunny Spain, and of chivalric France;
  And poor Ramona’s love and her despair,
  Thrill, like Aeolian harp, the twilight air—­
  So the dear garden claims its mystic due. 
  Linking the legends of the Old and New.

FRANCES MARGARET MILNE,
in The Grizzly Bear Magazine, June, 1909.

AUGUST 29.

The evening primrose covers the lower slopes with long sheets of brightest yellow, and from the hills above, the rock-rose adds its golden bloom to that of the sorrel and the wild alfalfa, until the hills almost outshine the bright light from the slopes and plains.  And through all this nods a tulip of delicate lavender; vetches, lupins and all the members of the wild-pea family are pushing and winding their way everywhere in every shade of crimson, purple and white.  New bell-flowers of white and blue and indigo rise above the first, which served merely as ushers to the display, and whole acres ablaze with the orange of the poppy are fast turning with the indigo of the larkspur.  The mimulus alone is almost enough to color the hills.

T.S.  VAN DYKE,
in Southern California.

AUGUST 30.

THE MARIPOSA LILY.

  Insect or blossom?  Fragile, fairy thing,
  Poised upon slender tip, and quivering
  To flight! a flower of the fields of air;
  A jeweled moth; a butterfly, with rare
  And tender tints upon his downy wings,
  A moment resting in our happy sight;
  A flower held captive by a thread so slight
  Its petal-wings of broidered gossamer
  Are light as the wind, with every wind astir,
  Wafting sweet odor, faint and exquisite. 
  O dainty nursling of the field and sky. 
  What fairer thing looks up to heaven’s blue
  And drinks the noontide sun, the dawning’s dew? 
  Thou winged bloom! thou blossom-butterfly!