cried when he heard the hunting howl, "but they are at their tricks again,' and then in English he voiced a volley of broken, inconsequential oaths, for he saw what the howlers were about.

One imputes a sixth sense to that son of a thief misnamed the coyote, to make up for speech, persuasion, concerted movement, in short, the human faculty. How else do they manage the terrible relay races by which they make quarry of the fleetest footed? It was so they plotted the antelope's last running in the Ceriso: two to start the chase from the black rock toward the red scar of a winter torrent, two to leave the mouth of the wash when the first were winded, one to fend the ravine that led up to the broken ridges, one to start out of the scrub at the base of a smooth upward sweep, and, running parallel to it, keep the buck well into the open; all these when their first spurt was done to cross leisurely to new stations to take up another turn. Round they went in the hollow of the crater, velvet-footed and sly even in full chase, and biding their time. It was a good running, but it was almost done when away by the west gap the buck heard the voice of Little Pete raised in adjuration and the friendly blether of the sheep. Thin spirals of dust flared upward from the moving flocks and signaled truce to chase. He broke for it with wide panting bounds and many a missed step picked up with incredible eagerness, the thin rim of his nostrils oozing blood. The coyotes saw and closed in about him, chopping quick and hard. Sharp ears and sharp muzzles cast up at his throat, and were whelmed in a press of gray flanks. One yelped, one went limping from a kick, and one went past him, returning with a spring upon the heaving shoulder, and the man in the reeds beside the bitter water rose up and fired.

All the luck of that day's hunting went to the homesteader, for he had killed an antelope and a coyote with

one shot, and though he had a bad quarter of an hour with a wild and loathly shepherd, who he feared might denounce him to the law, in the end he made off with the last antelope, swung limp and graceless across his shoulder. The coyotes came back to the killing ground when they had watched him safely down the ravine, and were consoled with what they found. As they pulled the body of the dead leader about before they began upon it, they noticed that the home

steader had taken the ears of that also.

Little Pete lay in the grass and wept simply; the tears made pallid traces in the season's grime. He suffered the torture, the question extraordinary of bereavement. If he had not lingered so long in the meadow of Los Robles, if he had moved faster on the Sand Flat trail,

but, in fact, he had come up against the inevitable. He had been breathed upon by that spirit which goes before cities like an exhalation and dries up the gossamer and the dew.

From that day the heart had gone out of the Ceriso. It was a desolate hollow, reddish-hued and dim, with brackish waters, and moreover the feed was poor. His eyes could not forget their trick of roving the valley at all hours; he looked by the rill of the spring for hoof-prints that were not there.

Fronting the west gap there was a spot where he would not feed, where the grass stood up stiff and black with what had dried upon it. He kept the flocks to the ridgy slopes where the limited horizon permitted one to believe the crater was not quite empty. His heart shook in the night to hear the longdrawn hunting howl, and shook again remembering that he had nothing to be fearing for. After three weeks he passed out on the other side and came that way no more. The juniper tree stood greenly by the spring until the homesteader cut it down for firewood. Nothing taller than the rattling reeds stirs in all the hollow of the Ceriso. Mary Austin.

TRAVELERS entering the Santa Clara Valley at the foot of San Francisco Bay in California may see from their car windows, on one of the peaks of the Monte Diablo Range to the east, the faint white domes of a famous observatory. There stands the great telescope erected by the will of James Lick, once the most powerful, and still the most effective in the world, his unique tomb and title to immortality in the regard of men.

Forty miles in from the sea, protected from its direct winds by the farther Santa Cruz hills, and lifted above its prevailing fogs, Mount Hamilton has proved the wisdom of its choice as an outpost on the world's frontier. It is rendered accessible from the town of San José by one of the finest mountain roads in America, twenty-eight miles of winding even grade through scenery at all times beautiful, from the orchards and vineyards of the foothills to the barren steeps of the Mountain itself.

From

the summit sweeps a view that is unsurpassed the pale white haze of the sea over Monterey; the flashing Point Reyes Light on the headlands far beyond San Francisco; the first white peaks at the Lassen Buttes two hundred miles to the north; thence the magnificent Sierras, circling the east and dipping lower and lower till they meet the cross ranges by Tehachapi in the far southeast, an unbroken arc of perpetual snow exceeding the distance from Boston to Baltimore, and equaling that between Philadelphia and Cleveland.

But it is the equable climate of midCalifornia that has justified this Mountain's distinction as the site of a great observatory. Lifting far enough above the populous valleys to escape their dust and smoke, it yet avoids the rigors of greater altitudes and their varying extremes. Over it domes a sky like Italy's,

sparing of rain, prodigal of sun, where by night's magic heights of blue grow depths of blackness, and, reach beyond reach, the far stars shine that we cannot number. This untroubled atmosphere has kept the Lick telescope, no longer the largest in the world, still king in its realm, and has drawn to the wilderness a group of men who count the heavens a recompense for the loss of the world, men who are willing to give their lives to the working out of problems that may take a lifetime to solve. For discoveries of sudden or startling facts and phenomena, in which the Lick Observatory has had its share, are usually incidental, things picked up by the way in the prosecution of long inquiries such as only observatories of pure research may undertake. The patient saving of detail, the persistent following of uncertain clues, the applying of mathematical tests, the interpreting of mathematical prophecy, the handling of machinery, the designing of delicate instruments, and the making and the care of them, all these things make up the astronomer's workaday life, but are hardly guessed by the visitor who is entertained of a Saturday night with a surface view of results and by a look at the stars through the telescopes that James Lick willed should be free to all.

Now and again this visitor, turning from the domes and instruments, craves to know of the human side of life in so remote a community. He counts the half-dozen astronomers and assistants, the three or four fellows just out of the universities, the instrument - makers, machinists, and workmen, the few families that stand for what there is of social life, cial life, thirty adults, perhaps, with a little colony of children, summing in all less than half a hundred: not a man but is concerned in the service of the Observatory; not a house, not an

implement but is owned by the state. No civic or social machinery, no doctor, no church, no club, my tourist, looking at the wide skies and the lonely hills, says blankly, "What do you do up here?" And my friend- there is no doubt of it — hides pity in his voice as he looks from my broad windows and talks of the things I love in the world. And my butcher boy, when I go to town, commiserates me openly, and my grocer sighs and shakes his head. All this amazed me when first I ran upon it! They do not know how we shut our eyes when we come down from the clean wilderness and ride in over the backyards of their cities; they little think how we choke with the disintegrated refuse that floats in their air; they do not guess how the commonplace streets pall upon one from the heights. Here the air we breathe is undefiled, the water we drink is crystal pure; here is no one aged or poor or sick; here each man does what he most would do, and money is not the goal: these are conditions unique, to be read of in philosophers' dreams.

And when asked what I do up here, being not an astronomer, and when pitied for my loneliness, I look at my Mountain's white domes and clustered dwellings; I count her peaks of famous. names, Huyghens, Kepler, Copernicus, Ptolemy; I think of her hidden cañons, her bird-songs, her gentle wild things, and of many a fern bank and moss-deep glen that has told its tale to me: resources, these, they do not guess, nor can they understand.

For the visitor sees the Mountain in one mood; for him she puts on her summer veil, her winter mask, or a radiant gown at her whim: to us she shows a thousand moods; nor in a year, nor in many years, may we compass her variety. I boast I will know my Wilderness; with one rock of lichens she baf

fles me. I mount my pony and make the circle of the hills; when I go back they are not the same. For sun and cloud work their ceaseless witchery, and

Nature holds the charm of change in changelessness that is like the fascination of personality. California valleys are one of two things, sun-steeped and still, or incredibly chill under depths of fog. The Mountain may be all things in a day: tempest-swept, lost to sun, to stars, to earth itself, till it breaks into sudden visions of color, light, and vastness, revealing cloud-framed bits of emerald valleys, or of purple peaks, or of steely Bay turned crimson under the setting sun; or wreathing itself in whiteness to stand like a pale nun before the morning.

have

Dearest of all are the wild ways, and best of all are the wild days. It is one of the mysteries that humanity houses itself when it rains. Never is the smell of outdoors so sweet, never are colors so fine as in wet air. You know not what stuff is in you till you have battled with a tempest. You have never guessed Nature's tenderness till you felt dropping rain on your face. You have never learned her ineffable peace till you have stood in the wilderness in the encompassing silence of falling snow. Then the wild things lose their fear. "Little things with lovely eyes" look out of the copses and make no move to run away; furry rabbits stop in your path, and golden-crowned sparrows hop about in the pouring rain, and with much bobbing of bright heads elect you to their stout-hearted company.

These are times when I forget I am of the conventional, and have a stren uous creed of golf and tennis to live up to on other days. Yet when the sun shines, down we shall plunge to the foxy links that lure us with high hopes and send us back without them. It is meet that sometimes we should toil; therefore were the Mount Hamilton Links invented and devised. They have furnished exercise for all the men of the

staff for five years, exercise with hoe and scuffle and rake and roller, and still the untamed ground-squirrel collects our balls into the depths of the earth;

still does the heaven-kissing hazard rise at every turn, and tempers and clubs and scores go down before him.

"What is a reasonable score for our links?" I ask of an expert from across the Continent. The Man from Midlothian mops his brow: "Eight hundred!" he says with conviction. I should have inquired before he had climbed "Mount Pisgah" and had fallen into the "Crocodile's Jaw!”

But this is golf; and the game, begun in earnest with the first fall rains, carries its enthusiasts far into spring, when the conquering march of rampant lupines and paint-brush and purple clover sweeps the brassey off the field. Nor at tennis, nor on the links, may the game absorb one utterly. When the hollow ball flies wild, and a player follows after it over the too near edge of a cañon, there again are the enchanting shadows stealing in a way quite new across Mount Day. Beyond the white domes, we know, Copernicus, sharp like a rock in rapids, cuts through the flying mist; far on the blue horizon the snowy Sierras rim the frozen east; while under our eyes in the west lies the shadowed Bay with the ships of the world at anchor. "Through the green" the meadow lark is singing the winter long his Exsultate Deo, while the great hawks in the air at play, rolling over and over, attack, retreat, and circle ever higher till they take their meteor flight into the invisible.

But if the winter so enchants, how. does the spring entice! In at the window flutes the rock wren, “See, see, see!" And up in the oaks the ashthroat chuckles, "Look! Look here! In the Kepler copses the thrasher chants and trills; by the Joaquin trail the buntings swing like scintillant jewels; while in the shimmering maples the grosbeaks warble an Elisir d'Amore, and act it, too, with consummate grace. Oh, we have our Tivolis and our Alcazars! And there are rivalries among the artists, and delicious human come

dies in feathers, and little fights in the wings; but you would miss the cheap pretense and the tinsel and the paint you pay two dollars a seat to see, O my Critic of the Pitying Voice!

The

But you will be saying this is far afield. What of the housekeeper and her house that she can no more escape than the snail his shell? She thinks a little further ahead, that is all; she uses a little longer prevision. Even in practical affairs the touch of the unique obtains. We market with the invisible, and we pay with invisible coin. World that somehow sends us our beef and mutton daily is but a voice at the telephone, and a sense of the uncanny still clings to that elfish toy which has so emancipated us from the time-consuming mails, the prompt small voice out of the silence that is Humanity's response to our call.

We live in the shadow of the great Observatory: it is very renowned, and we are very proud of it, and have as little to do with it as possible. “What? You don't study astronomy? You don't work with your husband? exclaims the shocked enthusiast. Chastened, I explain: If the women have a duty in a place like this, it is to bring variety into its life; to be intelligent concerning all that is being done, and interested of course, and to lend a helping hand when one really can help; but for the rest, to live in different interests and to resist the tendency to narrowness that is inevitable to isolation; in fine, to realize a home in the wilderness, and what we can of the wider culture, this seems to us a plainer duty than hanging to the skirts of Science.

Yet the Great Telescope dominates us all: it shapes our ends; our talk is as likely to be "shop" as in any circle. The great glass never stands unused when the "seeing " is possible; Sundays, holidays, there is no exception, not because there is any law to that effect, but because, if he knows that instrument is idle, an astronomer cannot

be kept away from it. The same is true of the whole equipment to an almost equal degree. There are lesser tyrants, and each is the law to the man who uses it. Therefore, when the hostess sends out her invitations for an evening, it is understood, no clouds, no party. Even in winter the mists are fickle, and after a day of gloom, may settle and leave a sky resplendent. Hence social functions are likely to be impromptu, and as the years go on, the charm of the fireside and the books that so invite grows dearer, without doubt. Indeed, as a dear old German woman once put it, "It is well to be goot friends mit yourself on Mount Hamilton."

For there is the time of solitude, the time of the summer regnant, when the astronomers work all of the night and sleep most of the day; when the yellow sun never veils its relentless glare; when the yellow dust settles wide and deep; when the panting birds grow still in the copses; when the smoke of burning forests shuts down on the rim of the hills; when the land is parched, and the streams in the cañons fail. Then the wise woman gets to the seashore, but the obstinate one stays on, and learns what a wonderful thing is the sky at Mount Hamilton's best. Then the nights have a softness that Eastern summers know, without the enervate air. Then the heavens grow familiar, and the stars assume their names, and under their stately passing there is time to think, to feel, and to be one's self.

Then it depends on one's resources,

Gentle Critic, whether one comes to the state of Du Maurier's Bride and Groom who spent three weeks in the wilderness. Then the Bride sighs, "Would n't it be lovely if one of our friends would step in just now ? S. ys the Bridegroom, "Yes, or even an enemy! But if the hunger is too much for us we send for you, O Guest, who never so charmed as in these solitudes. And sometimes without our asking, just by way of the gift of the gods, you come, and how various your names and how fragrant your memories! I see you now in review: the thoughtful guest who never lets us know because he means we shall take no trouble, may he be some time perched twenty-eight miles from a lemon and the Queen step in to tea! There's the enthusiastic guest who has never looked down upon a cloud, alas that he sometimes happens up n an inside view of one! And the worshipful guest to whom an astronomer is a being not of earth, may he never outstay his illusion! The zealous guest, too, who perceives all our lacks and would have us a missionary station, adding naïvely, "There must be lots of ministers who would be glad to be entertained a week and give you a sermon! But last and dearest is the delightful guest who brings a breath of all humanity and gives us speech of the great world. And he perceives that we, too, have our concerns and duties; "that we, too, are trying to "play the man and perform them with laughter and kind faces." Heaven bless him, and bring him again and often! Ethel Fountain Hussey.

THE greatest need of popular government is the University. The greatest need of higher education is Democracy.

The scholar and the man must work together. The free man must be a scholar. The scholar must be a man.

It is not the necessary function of Democracy to do anything very well. There is nothing in collective effort which insures right action. Its function is to develop intelligence and patriotism through doing for ourselves all things possible