"Marry George?" she answered. "Why, foolish Yat! George and I were married yesterday."

She laughed again, and bent over him. "Poor Yat," she said, but there was only mockery in her tones. "Poor Yat."

She stooped closer - so close that he saw every little mocking wrinkle about her mouth and felt her breath fan his cheek. Suddenly his eyes fired up and he made a start as if to take hold of her. She leaped back, and then, as Yat sank down once more, she came and stooped over him again. "Poor Yat," she crooned. "Did you come near having another fit then?"

some time he sat stolidly and looked upon her. He saw the outline of her figure; a portion of her smooth breast was disclosed through the torn bosom of her gala dress. Her face was half turned towards him and he noted that there was a great red mark down across the temple. But he sat for hours gazing immovably upon her. Then that soft breast and that cruel red streak began to appeal to him and he called softly, "Maria!" and then louder, "Maria! Maria!"

But Maria did not hear. A blue-jay heard him, though, and chattered loudly. From the sweat-house came laughter and shouts, and the ponies tied close to where he sat whinnied and stamped about. But from Maria came no sound. And so Yat sat until some of the Indians came and carried Maria away. George swore vengeance, but Chief Pamblo, out of his love of Yat, paid a large indemnity and the matter passed.

For many years Yat was a familiar figure to the hill people. He never became able to walk, but he could swing his body over the ground by his arms, which became unusually long and strong. So this is the story of Yat, and like Yat, it is now ended.

Elwyn Irving Hoffman.

HE garish glare of the noonday sun died slowly out. The warm, sweet breath of the orchards gave place to the warm, rich incense of the redwoods. We were moving quietly along a vast woodland aisle that was ever on the point of terminating. Light and color seemed to steal upward as though escaping a repetition of adjectives of appreciation and expressions of reverence that came naturally to all lips.

Here and there a shaft of sunlight filtered down from the interlaced tree tops

Bret Harte.

as though in protest of the roseate gloom, but only served to intensify the dull red of the vast columns that turned mid-day into twilight. On either side the trees reached up into the clear blue of the Californian sky three hundred feet. Our car, the engine, the forests of our childhood, our very anticipations and expectations, became insignficant in comparison with their vast bulk. There is almost an unreality about them that makes one feel that they belong to another world or have outlived their age- the age when giants stalked beneath their shade.

From Guerneville four miles into the heart of the redwoods the railroad twists

and turns along the shelving banks of Russian River over trestles and down sylvan glades, preparing one by easy stages for the full beauty of what is to come. The term forest, as known to all the world outside of California, gives but a faint idea of the home of the redwoods. The trees are so vast, the distance between them so great, the bark-strewn ground so open, that the almost absolute lack of underbrush, and the absence of branches within two hundred or more feet from the earth, suggest rather a chapter from Baron Munchausen. mastodon walking demurely down a village street could not call forth more ejaculations of surprise. You begin to doubt your eyes, for you look twice before you reach their tops.

A

On a sunny day, when streamers of light fresco and enamel the redwoods' leafy roof, or when the fog creeps in from the Pacific and fills all the higher arches with a clinging fleecy mist like clouds of incense, hiding everything save the gigantic architecture of the boles, then all that is lacking is the Sistine choir and the processional to convince the beholder that he is on sacred ground within some Brobdignagian cathedral.

As a mere sight for the tourist and the globe-trotter a redwood grove is as much. one of the "lions" of California as the Yosemite, Mount Shasta, the Geysers, or the higher Sierra. Nowhere else in the world are there trees to compare in size and height with either the "big tree," the Sequoia gigantea, or the redwood, the Sequoia sempervirens, not even in the jungles of the tropics. I have cut my way day after day through the most impenetrable Asiatic jungles where the light of the sun is never seen and have felt neither enthusiasm nor wonder, for I knew that they were remarkable only for their denseness, which was due to the network of vines and parasites and

A REDWOOD BURL.

not to the height of the trees. There is nothing inspiring in such a living wall, and the impression is one of irritation rather than of wonder.

Across the Bay, past the frowning portals of Alcatraz, to Tiburon, three hours ride through tule marshes, past typical ranches, by picturesque towns, in the midst of vineyards and orchards of peach, fig, and prune, brings one, almost before he is aware, out of the smiling California lowlands into the heart of the finest grove of redwoods in the State. It is a bit of Nature's wonderland that stands almost within sight of the Golden Gate and yet is missed by thousands of sight-seers, who think that there is nothing to do but go out to the