DEAR JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT: I read in the February number about the bottled fish. I think it is very queer. In "Grimm's Fairy Tales" there is a story about a fox that crept into a hole where there was something to eat. After he ate it he grew so fat that he could not get out, and he stayed there till the farmer found him and killed him. I suppose it was the same way with the fish, only he fed on oysters, and as I think there are no farmers at the bottom of the sea, he stayed there till he was drawn up. If I had been that fish, I would have starved myself till I was thin enough to get out. I have taken St. Nicholas since I was two years old, and my mamma says she brought me up on it, so you see I have been well brought up.
You are to be told in this month's ST. NICHOLAS, I hear, about a curious "lace-leaf," a "vegetable necktie," and a "caricature plant." If so, this is a good time for me to show you a curiosity called the newspaper plant, which the Little School-ma'am described the other day to the young folk of the Red School House.
It seems that in certain far-away countries called New Mexico and Arizona, there are great tracts of desolate desert lands, where the very hills seem destitute of life and beauty, and where the earth is shriveled from centuries of terrible heat. And in these desert-tracts grow a curious, misshapen, grotesque and twisted plant that seems more like a goblin tree than a real one.
Of all the trees in the world, you would imagine this to be the most outcast and worthless--so meager a living does it obtain from the waste of sand and gravel in which it grows. And yet this goblin tree is now being sought after and utilized in one of the world's greatest industries--an industry that affects the daily needs of civilization, and is of especial importance to every girl and boy who reads the pages of ST. NICHOLAS.
Those wise folk, the botanists, call our goblin tree by its odd Indian name of the "Yucca" palm.
This plant of the desert for a long time was considered valueless. But not long ago it was discovered that the fiber of the Yucca could be made into an excellent paper.[E] And now one of the great English dailies, the London _Telegraph_, is printed upon paper made from this goblin tree. Indeed, the _Telegraph_ has purchased a large plantation in Arizona, merely for the purpose of cultivating this tree, and manufacturing paper from it. So, you see, the Yucca is now a newspaper plant.