With such an illumination and marine fireworks we brought the last cruise virtually to an end, and another morning found the ship tied to the same coal wharf in Departure Bay. The pleasure travellers laid their plans for other trips, and in a few days the company

was scattered.

Those who went up the Frazer River to its cañons said later: "The best of the Frazer only equals Grenville Channel, and the dust and heat are intolerable after the northern coast."

Those who went down past Mt. Tacoma, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Shasta, and into the Yosemite, said: "If we had only seen these places first, and not after the Alaska trip."

All agreed in the summing up of an enthusiast, who had travelled the fairest scenes of Europe and his own country, and wrote: "Take the best of the Hudson and the Rhine, of Lake George and Killarney, the Yosemite and all Switzerland, and you can have a faint idea of the glorious green archipelago and the Alaska coast."

My first journey on the Idaho in 1883 ended with our staying by the ship, and going around outside. from Puget Sound to the Columbia River, and then we were tied up for three days at the government wharf at Tongue Point, near Astoria, while three hundred tons of Wellington coal was slowly unloaded. The smoke of forest fires and the summer fogs hid all the magnificent shores and headlands at the mouth of the great river, and the hundreds of little fishing-boats, with their pointed sails, that set out at sunset, soon vanished in the opaline mists. After dark a thousand tiny points of flame could be dimly

seen on the water, as the fishermen lighted the fires. in their boats to cook their suppers, or set their lanterns in the bows as they sailed slowly back to the canneries with their loads of salmon. Five days after we crossed the Columbia River bar, the ship reached Portland, and the journey was over.

The second cruise, which was blessed with clear sunshiny weather from beginning to end, was concluded at Port Townsend, where for three weeks we enjoyed such perfect summer days as are known nowhere but on Puget Sound. With Mt. Baker on one side as a snowy sentinel, and the broken range of the Olympic Mountains a violet wall against the western sky, it needed only the foreground of water and the immaculate silver cone of Mt. Tacoma rising over level woodlands, to make the view from Port Townsend's heights the finest on Puget Sound. When a great full moon hung in the purple sky of night, miles of the waters of the bay were pure, rippling silver; and, like a vision in the southern sky, glistened a faint, ethereal image, the peak of Mt. Tacoma, sixty miles away.

Appreciating all that was overhead and around us, we found a wonderland under foot one morning by rowing and poling a small boat far in under the wharf, at the low tide. The water having receded thirteen feet, the piles for that distance were covered with the strangest and most fanciful marine growths. Star fish, pink, yellow, white, and purple, clung to the piles, many of them with eighteen and twenty-one feelers radiating from their thick fleshy bodies, that were twelve inches and more in diameter. There were slender, skeleton-like little starfish of the

brightest carmine, and bunches of snow-white and pale yellow anemones (actinia) that looked like large cauliflower blossoms when opened fully under the water. Long brown pipes, growing in clusters on the piles, hung out crimson petals and ragged streamers until it seemed as though thousands of carnation pinks had been swept in among the piles. The serpula, that lives in this pipe-stem house, is valued for fish bait, and the voyage under the wharf was not wholly for studies in zoology. Huge jelly-fish floated by, opening and shutting their umbrella-like disks of pink and yellow, as if some wind were blowing rudely the petals of these wonderful blossoms of the sea. Shells of the "Spanish dollar" lay on the sands at the bottom, and at the water line little jelly-fish could be seen shimmering like disks of ice in the clear light of the early summer morning. A scientist would have been wild at sight of that natural aquarium, and to any one it would appear as a part of wonderland, a beautifully decorated hall for mermaids' revels, and a model for a transformation fairy scene in some spectacular drama. The woods and drives, the scenes and shores about Port Townsend, excite the admiration of every visitor, and when the aquarium under the wharf is regularly added to its list of attractions, that charming town will have done its whole duty to the travelling public.

CHAPTER XXIII.

I

SEALSKINS.

HAVE never been to the Seal Islands myself, and have no desire to cross the twenty-six hundred miles of rough and foggy seas that lie between San Francisco and the Pribyloff Islands, in Bering Sea. Considering that there are so many good people who think that the Seal Islands constitute Alaska, or that all Alaska is one Seal Island, it has been urged that I must include something about the seal fisheries if I mention Alaska at all. In deference to the prejudice which exists against having people write of the regions they have never visited, all apologies are offered for this reprint of a rambling letter about the Seal Islands and sealskins, and containing a few facts for which I am indebted to members of the Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco, and others who have been to the islands and are interested in the fur trade.

For all that has been written concerning the Seal Islands, many very intelligent people have the vaguest ideas of their position, size, and condition, and few women who own sealskin garments even know that the scientist's name for the animal that first wears that fine pelt is Callorhinus ursinus, or are acquainted

with any of the other remarkable facts and statistics concerning the sealskin of commerce. Such an absurd misstatement as the following lately appeared in a journal published at the national capital in an article entitled "Our Northern Land," and worse errors are frequently made:

"The seal fisheries are situated near Sitka, and on the first of July (1884) a railway will be begun between the two points."

When we first started for Alaska we expected to find Sitka the centre of information about everything in the rest of the Territory, but at that ancient capital less was known about the seal fisheries than at San Francisco. The Seal Islands, discovered by the skipper Gerassim Pribyloff in 1788, lie to the north and west of the first of the Aleutian chain of islands. St. Paul, the largest of these four little rocky islets in Bering Sea, is fourteen hundred and ninety-one miles west of Sitka, and between two and three hundred miles from the nearest mainland. All communication with these islands is by way of San Francisco, and the company leasing them permit none but government vessels, outside of their own fleet, to touch at St. Paul and St. George. The Alaska Commercial Company's vessels make four trips a year, their steamers going in ten days generally, but the Jeannette, when starting on its Arctic expedition, fell behind all competitors in a slow race by taking twenty-five days to steam from San Francisco to St. Paul.

At the time of the Alaska purchase, in 1867, the most ardent supporters of the measure laid no stress upon the value of these Seal Islands, and Senator