Donner Lake a pleasure resort! Can you understand for one moment how strange this seems to me? I must be as old as Haggard's "She," since I have lived to see our papers make such a statement. It is years since I was there, yet I can feel the cold and hunger and hear the moan of the pines; those grand old trees that used to tell me when a storm was brewing and seemed to be about the only thing there alive, as the snow could not speak. But now that the place is a pleasure resort—the moan of the pines should cease.
VIRGINIA REED MURPHY.
MARCH 25.
THE LURE OF THE DESERT LAND.
Have you slept in a tent alone—a tent
Out under the desert sky—
Where a thousand thousand desert miles
All silent 'round you lie?
The dust of the aeons of ages dead,