42 
THE GUIDE TO NATURE 
“Our Lord’s Candle.” 
BY MRS. FANNIE E. BLAKELY, LOS ANGELES, 
CALIFORNIA. 
I spent the summer solstice among 
the hills, climbing the long ascent from 
Los Angeles in the Richardson Com- 
pany’s auto stage and alighting at 
Tujunga in the noon brightness of mid- 
summer day. 
In California’s floral calendar this is 
the festal time of “Our Lord’s Candle,” 
the Spanish California name for the 
“A FOUNTAIN OF LIVING ENERGY.” 
yucca, the Spanish needle or Spanish 
bayonet of Mexico. On the wide ex- 
panses of the mesa, the steep sides of 
the foothills, the barren wastes of the 
arroyo, its immense sprays of flowers 
rise like majestic candles to a height of 
fifteen, sometimes twenty, feet. Each 
plant stands isolated from its fellows 
with a space of a hundred or more feet 
between it and its nearest neighbor. 
This withdrawn and solitary habit adds 
to its dignity and impressiveness, and 
makes it visible at a great distance. 
Seen on the farthest hillsides, too re- 
mote for the eye to distinguish them as 
flowers, they seem to spring out of the 
dark myrtle green of the chaparral like 
jets of luminous foam. 
Standing near one of these floral 
giants that seems to lift itself like a 
great altar light into the cloudless blue 
of the sky, I find myself awed and silent 
as in the presence of a foaming cascade. 
A cascade it is in truth, reversed and 
upspringing. a fountain of living 
energy. 
In no situation does the plant impress 
me more than when growing on the 
desert levels where the mountain 
gorges pour down their storm floods. 
Here where the water torn expanse 
ridged with drifts of boulders, gravel 
and sand, gleams under the fierce sub- 
tropical sun like the blanched ribs of 
the world, this marvelous flower lifts its 
cream white spray straight as a mast 
and motionless as if carved in alabaster, 
springing up like a white flame into the 
white radiance of “the beautiful, awful 
summer day.” 
Transfiguration. 
A few nights later, beside a small fire 
we had built in the cool of evening, I 
tried to tell old Donald something 
about the Transfiguration, how Christ 
had gone up on the mount with Peter 
and John and James, and what had hap- 
pened there. 
“It wasn’t that Christ himself was 
actually changed as he prayed on the 
mountain top,” I said to Donald. “The 
change was in Peter and John and 
James, who in these moments saw 
Christ with a new vision and a new 
understanding. The Transfiguration 
was simply a mental process of their 
own ; they saw clearly now where be- 
fore they had been half blind. And I 
am wondering if this old world of ours 
wouldn’t change for us in the same way 
if we saw it with understanding, and 
looked at it with clean eyes?” — James 
Oliver Curwood in “God’s Country.” 
Spiral Lightning. 
BY CHARLES D. ROMIG. AUDENRIED, PENN. 
Some years ago a tall hemlock tree 
in this place was struck by lightning. 
On examination I found a neat spiral 
channel cut through the bark from top 
to bottom of the tree trunk. The spiral 
or groove was about two inches wide 
and as deep as the bark was thick. The 
interesting part is that this tree was 
not otherwise damaged. Usually the 
result of a lightning stroke is a broken 
trunk, but here is only the even and 
uniform spiral cut in the bark. 
