"The Countryman" ceased to be published. Joel must be off after his fortune. First he went to Macon, Georgia, joining the force on "The Telegraph" as a type-setter and writer. Mr. Turner had given him sincere praise and encouragement as a writer, having surprised scraps of prose and verse in his paper which he could not account for until Joel confessed he had "put 'em in," and written them too.

Photograph by Wesley Hirshberg.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.

"You'll go far," said that good friend to him, though he probably little suspected how far.

From Macon, young Harris drifted to New Orleans, where he worked on the staff of "The Crescent," presently moving on to Savannah to become associate editor of "The News." Here he met a charming French-Canadian girl, Essie La Rose, a sea-captain's daughter, and the two were married on April 21, 1873. Harris continued to work on the paper, and with his wife's help translated a volume of Ortoli's folk stories from the French.

In 1876 he finally moved to Atlanta, which was to be his future home. So identified did the city become with him that once, at a dinner given in London by a number of distinguished Englishmen to some visiting Americans, when Atlanta was mentioned the English knew all about the place. "That's where 'Uncle Remus' lives, of course," they said, and that was quite enough.

Mr. Harris became an editor of "The Atlanta

Constitution," with other men of mark, among them Evan P. Howell and Sam Small, known for his funny and entertaining "Old Si" stories, distinctly Southern yarns. An interruption coming in these, Howell said to Joel: "Why don't you try your hand at this sort of thing?" Harris thought he would. And so the first "Uncle Remus" story was written.

At once a great shout for more went up all over the country. Northern editors wanted all the stories he could write, and, in less time than you could believe, "Uncle Remus" was famous.

Harris was always amused at this fame, and seemed to regard it as a kind of humorous incident in his life, a sort of joke on other people. But he worked hard, writing steadily, and taking the work itself seriously. He loved his colored friends, and he tried with all his power clearly to interpret their quaint wisdom and homely fun to the rest of the world. He succeeded so well that he produced a matchless series of stories, full of true poetic feeling. The first collection, "Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings," appeared in 1880, and after that each year or two would see a new volume. His wife relates that he himself preferred the story "Free Joe" to any other. But I think the rest of us will find it hard to pick any particular one as a special favorite; there are too many that crowd each other for that place, as soon as we begin to think them

over.

Though grown-up people read and love Joel Chandler Harris, he liked best of all to please the children. His own children would play about the room where he was at work, and were his preferred critics. If they did n't like a story, it would have to be rewritten.

Mr. Harris was not alone a story-writer, however. He was a strong Southerner, and as editor of his paper from 1890 to 1901, he did a great deal to help the cause of the new South, both in urging his people to do the best for themselves, to develop their resources and set their ambition high, and in helping the North to understand Southern aims and Southern character. A year before his death, which occurred on July 3, 1908, he began the publication of a new magazine, "The Uncle Remus Magazine." It was established mainly with the idea of making North and South better acquainted, and Mr. Harris announced that its endeavor would be "to represent all that is good and true, all that is sane and sensible, and all that is reasonable and just," words that might stand very well as descriptive of the gentle author's own life ambition.

As money came in from his books, he was able to build for himself and his wife and the brood

of children a charming little house, which came to be called "Wren's Nest," partly because a pair of the audacious little birds built a nest in the mail-box at the gate, and partly because its cozy attractiveness somehow suggested the name. Most of our American men of letters came to stay at one time or another with Uncle Remus in this tree-bowered home, among them another great lover of children, James Whitcomb Riley, for these two, both so sweet and sound to the very core, were dear friends. Mr. Harris was, in truth, a perfect friend-he had a genius for the business. He seemed to know all about people's hearts, and he never had any trouble in loving, be it man or child or animal. His slow, drawling speech was golden with kindness, his outlook on life was happy, normal, and healthy. He liked above all things to hear laughter, and he often said that he wanted no other reward than to be told, "You have made some of us laugh, you have made some of us happy." That reward was his in no stinted measure-it goes on now, after he has passed beyond the reach of those who love him and laugh with him without ever having seen him, some of them beginning to do so who were not born when he died.

A great many persons say they love the simple life, and now and then, during vacation, they go out and live it. But Uncle Remus was the simple life itself, without thinking anything at all about it. Simple pleasures, straight and simple talk, simple surroundings, these were his natural choice. All children loved him instinctively, and he was quite as willing as his own hero, Uncle Remus himself, to stop whatever he was about and sit down to tell a story.

There is an interesting thing in regard to these stories that was brought out in a report of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, and that is that the tales are from Indian sources, from our own red men, and not from far-away Africa. The slaves in older times had associated closely with several Indian tribes, such as the Cherokees, and had heard the stories of the rabbit who was so clever that no one could fool him, and of the many other little creatures of wood and field. For the Indians had a wealth of such tales, and used to tell them round their camp-fires to their own children, and to the little piccaninnies who came to play while their mammies worked. Gradually the colored folk adopted the stories for their own, altering them somewhat of course, putting in things better suited to plantation life and ways, and leaving out others that belonged more directly to the freer and wilder outlook of the Indian. But at bottom the tales are Indian.

However, it makes little difference where they come from, for it is Joel Chandler Harris's particular way of telling them that makes them so wonderful, so amusing, so fresh. If it had n't been for him, a whole world of stories would never have been known to us, and he has made the negro dialect as familiar to America as Walter Scott made the Scottish to England.

As for any of you, if you don't know and love him already, get one of the "Uncle Remus" books, or perhaps "Little Mister Thimblefinger and His Queer Country," or "On the Plantation," which tells a good deal about the author's own youth, and go off somewhere where you are n't likely to be disturbed, and have a perfectly glorious time.

THE LIFE OF A SEQUOIA It is always strange to think of things on our globe having been, before we were born, the same as we see them. It requires an effort to imagine the world of waving trees and running streams, breakfast-times and bedtimes, work and play, sunshine and rain, and all that makes up our lives, without us. I think most people who have visited the Sequoias, or Giant Trees of California, will have felt this especially there. As one takes in the immensity of their size, their huge solidity and majestic growth, one feels that men are but a sort of insect, very much like the gnats and dragon-flies hovering in the sunlit spaces among the slowly waving masses of foliage.

The set of pictures shown here represents the various stages in the life of these wonderful trees. The first shows a group of infant Sequoias, growing in one of their little natural nurseries under the protection of the parent tree. These seedlings are four or five feet high, and probably eight or ten years old. They are rather straggly youngsters, not so straight and trim as

the young of other cone-bearing trees usually are; but by the time they are twenty or thirty years old, and have grown, say, thirty feet high, they have straightened up and are as graceful and strong as young tree-gods. Every stem is as true and taper as a mast, every branch exact in curve and place, and the top leader is reaching up as though it knew its place was in the skies.

Now suppose that three hundred or four hundred years have passed, about as long as the time since Columbus, or the Pilgrim Fathers. Our young Sequoia has changed in shape and color, as well as in size (see second picture). It is now perhaps one hundred and fifty feet high, and straight as a plumb-line; but, for half the height, the stem is bare of branches, a stately column of cinnamon-red, quite distinct from all other trees of the forest. The base has spread in a curve as graceful as the outline of some lovely vase, and the bark begins to form into ridges and channels which the nuthatches love to explore for insects. But let five or six more centuries pass by; that would take us, going backward, to about the time when Leif Ericson and his shaggy Norsemen

found, or lost, their way across the Atlantic. Our tree is now in middle age, a stalwart tower, twenty feet or more in thickness, that seems able to uphold the very sky, and that makes the tall, slender pines and firs look like mere pencils in comparison (picture No. 3). The stem is now charred and ragged near the ground, for fire has swept many times about the great trunk, though it has been defied by the deep-plated bark, a foot or more in thickness, and the tree is still in its prime. Year by year the snows fall and melt away, the birds come and depart, the cones ripen in the sunny air, the seeds drift down the wind; but the centuries make but little difference to our Sequoia. Now and then, in a storm, a great branch falls, or lightning shatters the head; but if you could come century by century, you would see no change.

But even the Sequoia comes at length to old age. The fourth picture shows one of the oldest of the trees now standing, the famous Grizzly Giant of the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. I once

Sequoias believe to be much more. It seems all but impossible that any earthly thing should live so long; yet it is beyond doubt that this tree and some others of the Sequoias are fully of the age mentioned. How long the old hero may yet live is a matter of doubt, for though he is plainly doomed, his dying may last for a century.

It is claimed that the great cypress at Santa Maria del Tule is older than this ancient tree of ours, but it is certainly true that the Grizzly Giant is one of the oldest living things on earth. J. SMEATON CHASE.

camped for some weeks in this grove, and my favorite sleeping-place was beside this solemn old patriarch. When you realize that the trees you see surrounding him in the picture are themselves firs and pines of splendid growth, you can better judge of his vast size than by reading that he is nearly one hundred feet around. But what makes the tree so wonderful is its enormous age, which cannot be less than three thousand years, and which some people who have studied the

ONE OF THE OLDEST SEQUOIAS, THE GRIZZLY GIANT.

even show you a deer still carrying one antler, the other having just dropped off. It is for the purpose of telling the readers of ST. NICHOLAS the facts regarding this great phenomenon that I have had these pictures taken in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, and that I am writing this story to accompany them.

Let us take the great elk, Conqueror, as a typical specimen of the deer family, and follow the growth of his enormous antlers from the first of

the year to the following fall. Conqueror, last New-Year's day, had as fine a pair of antlers as one could find in the country. They spread over five feet from tip to tip, and weighed over thirtyfour pounds. They looked strong enough to last

About a week after Conqueror's antlers fell off, a nub made its appearance in each of the scars on his head, rapidly increasing in size until it was evident that these two nubs were the beginning of a new pair of antlers. The rapidity with which these new weapons grew was almost beyond belief. Every day seemed to show a difference in their size, and, by June, Conqueror had a fine pair of branching tines, as the prongs of the antler are called. Their appearance during development deserves some special mention. As you will see by the picture of the half-grown antlers, they have a furry look, and are said to be "in velvet." The velvet is a wonderful provision of nature for the protection of the growing antlers, and also a means for carrying the blood which supplies the materials for growth. It is fleshy in character, filled with minute bloodvessels pulsing with the pressure of the blood in them, and covered with short, thick, velvety fur, from which it gets its name. The whole mass of velvet is hot to the touch, and, if bruised, will bleed profusely. A smart blow on the tip, where the growth of the antler takes place, often permanently deforms the antler, so that Conqueror was exceedingly careful not to bump his ornaments until the velvet was all gone. By September, about five months after shedding the old antlers, the new pair had attained their full growth, and the velvet, being no longer necessary, dried up and scaled off in shreds, leaving the new tines hard and smooth, and ready for battle with any other

THE GREAT ELK, CONQUEROR.

a lifetime. But in April, Conqueror began to get restless, began to rub his head against tree-trunks and to bang his antlers against the fence. Apparently they were itching severely. Finally, one morning, one of the antlers snapped off short at the junction with the skull, and left the wapiti, which is the proper name of the American elk, a very comical, lopsided sight. So heavy was the unbalanced antler that he had often to lay his head on the ground or lean the antler against a tree in order to rest his aching neck. In about three days the other antler snapped off, as the first had done, and Conqueror appeared relieved and delighted, tossing his head like a young calf. The antlers were picked up by the keeper and mounted. It may seem curious that discarded antlers are rarely found in the wilderness, but this is explained by the fact that they disintegrate rapidly when exposed to the weather, and are also food for certain small insects which quickly reduce them to powder.

ELK WITH ANTLERS "IN VELVET."

elk which might wish to dispute with Conqueror the leadership of the herd.

Some idea of the age of any deer may be gained from the size of the antlers and the num