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conquering nation. But he can hardly be blamed for doing that. Many of us have increased in self-importance on much less encouragement. With his American wife and American-born babies, Portusach has now probably settled down to the life of a plain American citizen in the Territory of Guam, under the rule of Governor Leary.

The Charleston's work ended, she and her convoy sailed at once for Manila, passing on her way over almost the very spot where later she found her last anchorage amid the sands of that Eastern sea, with thirty-five fathoms of water ebbing and flowing over her decks.

Save to those who desired to scoff at a

clever bit of work on the part of some of America's most efficient naval officers, the incident of Guam's capture stands as one of the important events of the war. That it was a bloodless victory, won without injury to citizens of either contending nation, is a matter of credit to the officers concerned. To those of us who were actually at hand, and can speak of the details without depending upon secondhand or garbled information, it was a time none of us will forget, nor will we ever fail to render thanks that circumstances favored every move made against this portion of Spain's Oriental domain.

A

THE FACE IN THE CLIFF

USTERE, in rugged dignity it stands,
A beetling cliff of unrelenting stone.
Ages of storms have swept its granite face
With power impotent. No frown responds.
Ages of sunshine have played about its brow
And warmed its stolid front, without a smile
For recompense. Tragedies have passed
Within its ken, upon the deep. of ships
Broken and swept, with the accompaniment
Of upturned, ghastly faces, and streaming hair
Mingled with seaweed and frost with ocean brine.
Fair moonlight nights have lit the sands,
And lovers strolled about its base, with song
And sigh and tender speech. No sign
Upon its fixedness. Through storm and night
Or day and sunshine its lines remain unchanged.

And yet, behind that face of flinty stone,
Close within the caverns of its heart,

I found a clinging bird's nest: the mother
And her young twittering in sweet content.
There crickets chirped, and in a shady pool
Were silvery fishes playing.

Jacob Keith Tuley.

"H

A CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC

BY PIERRE N. BERINGER

E is not a painter; he's a botanist," said a brother artist as he looked at a collection of De Longpré's originals.

The remark set me to thinking. I pondered upon what would seem a frank and honest criticism of the great painter's work, and as I wandered from painting to painting I could not help but acknowledge that the Master is a botanist-yea, a master-hand at botany. And I would go further; in flower-painting, De Longpré has established a "school" entirely his own. The published reproductions are misleading in that they convey the idea of a narrow technique, what the French call finiolan, and which may be liberally translated to "finicky." Nothing is farther from the truth. And speaking of truth carries the critic straight back to the subject. Never has the water-colorist displayed

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attention because of his almost royal lineage; but he cannot deny that a love of the beautiful and of art and of flowers is handed down from father to son and from generation to generation. Contrary to the usual physique of the average Frenchman, De Longpré stands six feet, and it is six feet of humanity full of love and indulgence for his fellow man. He has created an atmosphere of good will about him. that is blown from his beautiful flower creations, and it seems as if nothing could ruffle his happy composure. His attainments run also in the direction of music, and while he works away with his brush the air is burdened with snatches of song from Verdi or Wagner, for his taste is cosmopolitan.

I am and shall always remain," he says, "a plain American citizen, and I believe this should be the proudest boast of any resident in this broad and beautiful land."

Since coming to California he has had reason to congratulate himself more than once upon his selection of the land of sunshine and flowers as his permanent residence. He has reveled in the field-flowers, the royal rose, the exotic orchid, the delicate sprays of fruit-blossoms, the ordinary daisy, the Black-eyed Susan, the chrysanthemum, the lilac, the clematis, the poppy, and even the common clover, as hown in harmonious arrangement in his informal compositions, never stilted and

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H

BY EDWARD W. PARKER

AND over hand, step after step, we

toiled upward through a raise that seemed to have no end. My hands faithfully followed the hob-nailed boots of Foreman Johns which took toll in loud rasping out of each iron rung of the narrow ladder. Between two fingers of my right hand the short-pronged light-stick pivoted and continually threatened to pry me from the ladder into nether darkness. But at last we crawled out of the well and scrambled thankfully on to the level gravelly floor of a large labore. Here we found an easy resting-place against the sloping side of a low dump of crushed rock. The air was close and warm and acted like a steam-bath on our tired bodies, wringing out the perspiration in streams. For a time we wiped our faces and smoked, silently contemplating the canopy of shadows.

Chancing to look at Foreman Johns I saw that his eyebrows were lifted reminiscently while he gazed across the dimly lighted slope at a deep hollow in the opposite side.

"Do you make out the cave in the far side, sir?" he asked, indicating the place with his pipe. "I tributed theer some ten years ago; and 't was a rich enough pitch while it lasted, too. "T was in a pocket like, but we got a good bit out of it."

When Johns spoke there was in his speech but the faintest accent of Cornwall. It was only under stress of excitement that the thirty years of California were forgotten and he relapsed to his mother tongue.

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It was my pardner in those days, Pete Henby, who discovered the vein's outcrop on the wall of the laboor. But when we had drifted in a ways it opened out beautifully. In some of the tierras we got from that drift-for the ground was soft like and needed watching, and we got most all tierras-in some of that, sir, the native quicksilver cropped out in flat beads like well, like drops of dew on a leaf. When you strike metal like that you can work yourself to death and never feel it. We stuck it out early and late, drilling and

blasting and picking and shoveling day in and day out. There was little talking done in that drift. Time was too valuable. It was dig and sweat.

"Pete was a lank and lean man. He was not a lady's man, by any means,-for an explosion in a Pennsylvania coal-mine had put the finishing touches on, by scarring his face and painting it with blue blotches. His face had made him shy of women. But he was one of God's true men underneath, and I believe his heart was as big as this here laboor.

"One day we were sitting on this dump eating our lunch. Just before we had set off some blasts, and the cracks in the face and along the top of the drift were waiting the pick. Several times as we sat here eating we heard a little rattling and fall of pebbles in the drift.

"She may come down of herself this time,' said I, for it is the same way, sir, with a cave as it is with a storm on the surface. Instead of a little gust of wind, there comes once and a while a little rattle of stones and a creak now and then of square-set timbers, and if you listen close you can tell that there is something on foot in the earth. You can tell a day ahead when she is coming-maybe a wheel-barrow load, maybe thousands of tons; and when she do, look out, for nothing in God's world can stop her.

"But Pete was not thinking about veinmetal. He was staring at the light, and eating little. I had nearly done when he straightened back and said, 'Jim, could you have blamed us if we had passed this pitch by along of that time when I first saw the red splotches on the wall?'

"This was a long speech for Pete, and I said wonderingly, 'No, Pete; I can't say as I would.'

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Suppose there was no outcropping at all, would anybody ha' known about that pitch, pardner?'

"None that I've ever heard about,' said I.

"What do they do when they come near such a pitch, Jim?'

"They pass it by,' I answered.

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