unassuming, sweet-spirited, gentle-hearted man a breadth, a largeness, a sweep of soul that are rare.

And Nature gives this same largeness to a woman as well as a man. Women who get into the bigness of the out-of-doors get away from feminine pettinesses just as surely as men do from their narrownesses and prejudices. I have two women friends in California (or had, until one passed on), both of them expert and scientific florists. One lived at San Buena Ventura, and the other at San Diego. The names of Mrs. Theodosia Shepard and Miss Kate Sessions are known throughout the world. Both women determined to devote their lives to a scientific study, out in the garden, of plant life, and each has therefore done things, achieved results that have made her world-famed. How much better this, than to live the narrow, contracted life of most women.

Another woman friend, Mrs. Sarah Plummer Lemmon, wife of the well-known botanist, and herself a botanist known to the whole scientific world, for years accompanied her husband in his expeditions throughout the wildest parts of Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Mexico. I doubt whether there is a person living who has so real and intimate a knowledge of all this country as has this brave and intrepid woman, who, when Apaches were on the warpath, calmly and steadfastly sustained her husband in his scientific work.

In storms and perils, in danger from wild animals and wilder men, away from all luxuries and comforts and often deprived of what most people call necessities, this woman communed with Nature and has thereby grown into a large, commanding, powerful, all-embracing soul, as much above the average woman in intellect as an athlete is above a baby.

I am no technical botanist, yet I have had pleasure untold when wandering in canyon, mountain, plain, forest, seaside, and desert in seeking to learn all I could of the flora of the region. When botanists said that the cereus giganteus the giant suahuaro was not to be found in California and I knew I had seen it growing on the California side of the Colorado River, there was great pleasure in photographing the few specimens I knew in this habitat and then in hunting for more. How well I remember one day climbing up hill and down, over rocky ridges and dangerous trails and places where there were no trails at all, every now and again seeing fresh specimens, in California, of this cactus" that did not grow in California." And when, at last, I stood on a ridge, looking down into a secluded canyon, where there were a dozen or more (which I photographed), I felt as if, humbly though it was, I were being used as an instrument for increasing the botanical knowledge of the world.

CHAPTER XII

RADIANCIES OF JOY, INSPIRATION, AND SERENITY

I WANT to radiate the healthfulness of joy.

can.

Joy is the sunshine of the soul. Let it shine. If there is so much of it that it fills the soul, it makes of it a luminous body that must radiate light and warmth and health to others. The joyous man is the healthy man, and he that has health should joy to give it to others, whenever and wherever he My friend, Marshall P. Wilder, was a radiating center of joy as well as fun. He was funny, but he was more he was joyous. There was no enmity, no malice, no unkindness, no cruelty in his fun; it was all healthful, kind, sane, and joyous. A little girl once said of a certain man: like that man because he always shines at me." Don't you want to shine and make glad the innocent heart of a child, the striving heart of the young, the sorrowful and vexed heart of the middle-aged, and the weary heart of the old? Well did Robert Louis Stevenson say:

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A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good

will; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.

Make the most of your happiness, and the least of your sorrows. Use the telescope at the enlarging end for the former and at the reducing end for the latter, until you have learned what most of us have to learn how foolish and wrong it is to make our joys mere incidents while we make our sorrows events.

I want to radiate a joy in the little things of to-day. Most people live in anticipation. The things of to-day are not enough. It is, "Oh, tomorrow next week next year will surely

bring me my heart's desire!" Let us learn that to-day is the fulfillment of the heart's desire. Take to-day all it brings, and it will make to-day so full that you will have no care for the joys of anticipation. Live now, so intensely, so fully, that life to-day will be compelled to deliver up all its treasures to-day. Hence every day becomes a perfect joy.

I want to radiate inspiration. I do not believe the idea that the saints of old who wrote "the Bible," are the only examples of inspiration. God inspires every good man and good woman, and all

good in all people comes from Him, for He is the original source.

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A self-centered life is a selfish life; a life that gives of itself freely and fully to all with whom it comes in contact is a life of inspiration — it is a radiating center of inspiration. It inspires to courage, to higher endeavor, to larger achievement. I need all this for myself, but I also long and desire to inspire it in others. Many a life seems to have inspiration for the carrying out of its own dreams, ambitions, desires, but none to give away. Yet the lives we touch may need just the impetus, the propelling force-light or vigorous that we can give to enable the fulfillment in them of half dormant ambitions for good, the attainment of noble endeavor.

What would become of the chick in the egg if the mother hen did not brood over it? She forgets her own desires to move about in the stronger desire to bring into active being the hidden lives within the eggs. Let us "brood "" over the souls of men and women, young men and maidens, boys and girls, and quicken to life the dormant powers of the weak, the tender. Aspirations may have begun in them that can only be quickened by warmth and love from outside. Oh, for wisdom, as well as love, to "brood" aright.

This implies a reaching out to others. It means an ability to feel even the hidden or only half-felt