JOSEPHINE CLIFFORD McCRACKIN.

SEPTEMBER 15.

THE VOICE OF THE CALIFORNIA DOVE.

  Come, listen O love, to the voice of the dove,
    Come, hearken and hear him say,
  “There are many Tomorrows, my love, my love,
    There is only one Today.”

  And all day long you can hear him say,
    This day in purple is rolled,
  And the baby stars of the milky way
    They are cradled in cradles of gold.

  Now what is thy secret, serene gray dove,
    Of singing so sweetly alway? 
  “There are many Tomorrows, my love, my love,
    There is only one Today.”

JOAQUIN MILLER.

SEPTEMBER 16.

With the tip of his strong cane he breaks off a piece of the serried bark, and a spider scurries down the side of the log and into the grass.  He chips off another piece, and a bevy of sow-bugs make haste to tumble over and play dead, curling their legs under their sides, but recovering their senses and scurrying off after the spider.  The cane continues to chip off the bark, and down tumble all sorts of wood-people, some of them hiding like a flash in the first moist earth they come to; others never stopping until they are well under the log, where experience has taught them they will be safe out of harm’s way.  And they declare to themselves, and to each other, that they will never budge from under that log until it is midnight, and that wicked meadow-lark is fast asleep.

ELIZABETH AND JOSEPH GRINNELL,
in Birds of Song and Story.

SEPTEMBER 17.

SIESTA.

  A shady nook where nought is overheard
    But wind among the eucalyptus leaves,
  The cheery chirp of interflitting bird,
    Or wooden squeak of tree-frog as it grieves. 
  The resting eye broods o’er the running grass,
    Or nodding gestures of the bowed wild oats;
  Watches the oleander lancers pass,
    And the bright flashing of the oriole notes. 
  Hushed are the senses with the drone of bees
    And the far glimmer of the mid-day heat;
  Dreams stealing o’er one like the incoming seas,
    Soft as the rustling zephyrs in the wheat;
  While on the breeze is borne the call of Love
  To Love, dear Love, of Majel, the wild dove.

CHARLES ELMER JENNEY,
in Western Field, Dec., 1905.

SEPTEMBER 18.

One summer there came a road-runner up from the lower valley, peeking and prying, and he never had any patience with the water baths of the sparrows.  His own ablutions were performed in the clean, hopeful dust of the chaparral; and whenever he happened on their morning splatterings, he would depress his glossy crest, slant his shining tail to the level of his body, until he looked most like some bright venomous snake, daunting them with shrill abuse and feint of battle.  Then suddenly he would go tilting and balancing down the gully in fine disdain, only to return in a day or two to make sure the foolish bodies were still at it.