Gbe TOarblcr 



25 



fourths of those spindle-legged, slab-bodied yearlings; which reminded one 

 of the " self-sharpening " type of Southern hogs so wittily made immortal 

 by the late, brilliant " Sam." Harriman; prince of story-tellers, in Northern 

 Wisconsin: " Why, gentlemen,' , — the "General " would say, in the telling of 

 his Southern experiences, in war-time, — "those mangy little long-legged 

 pigs would squeal all day long for corn wherewith to get strength to squeal 

 for more corn; so as to get strength to squeal for more corn, — to give them 

 more strength to squeal !" Of such a type, and of equal hungriness, were the 

 fifteen-hundred yearling cattle, — " dogeys," — all of whom passed within one- 



NO. 3 — DESERT HORNED LARK'S NEST. WITH PAVING, AMONG PRICKLY PEAR 



hundred feet, on either side, of the one small sage bush alone upon that 

 gumbo flat, along the drift fence. No wonder, then, that the photographer 

 stood and gazed in wonder at the unharmed nest, with its two half-incubated 

 eggs; on every side of which, but a few inches away, were the non-oblit- 

 erated tracks of many a passing hoof. A beating storm, but a few days 

 before, had left few marks, except the leveling of the always-roughening clav, 

 of the hoof-beats now replaced by the yawning cracks made in the gumbo 

 by the penetrating fierceness of a three-days' sun. (So do sun-beat and rain- 

 dash and hoof -stroke and tooth-cut incessantly change, on the desert plains, 

 the outward and apparent semblance of almost everything save the impreg- 

 nable cactus and the immortal sage !) 



