The jungle, however, rang with life. Brilliant birds flew, screaming at their approach—noisy parrots and macaws; the gaucamaya, one flush of red and gold; a king vulture, raven black save for his scarlet crest. From the safe height of a saber, monkeys showered vituperations upon them. Once an iguana, great chameleon lizard, rose under foot and dashed for the nearest water; again a python wound its slow length across the path. Vegetation was equally gorgeous, always strange. He saw plants that stung more bitterly than insects; insects barely distinguishable from plants. Here a tree bore flowers instead of leaves; there flowers grew as large as trees. ∗ ∗ ∗ Birds, beasts, flowers—all were strange, all were wonderful.
HERMAN WHITAKER,
in The Planter.
JULY 26.
Sitting in the white-paved pergola at Montecito. with overhead a leafy shelter of pink-flowered passifloras, looking out over the little lake, its surface dotted with water-lilies, its banks fringed with drooping shrubs and vines, the hum of the bee and the bird in the air—I looked down over a wonderful collection of nearly 200 rare palms and listened to the music that floated up from their waving branches like that of a thousand silken-stringed eolian harp; and there came into my mind visions of a people that shall be strong with the strength of great hills, calm with the calm of a fair sea, united as are at last the palm and the pine, mighty with the presence of God.
BELLE SUMNER ANGIER,
in The Garden Book of California.
JULY 27.
THE GIANT SEQUOIAS.
O lofty giants of the elder prime!