LETTER VII.

STEAMING UP THE ICE-PACKED FIORDS AND CHANNELS OF THE ARCTIC COUNTRY OWNED BY UNCLE SAM. SALMON CANNERIES. CANOE BUILDING BY NATIVES. ASCENT OF THE "MUIR" GLACIER, 300 FEET ABOVE WATER. FANTASTIC ICE FORMATIONS AT TAKOU. SUMMER AND WINTER CLIMATES. IMPUDENT CROWS AND ORATORICAL RAVENS.

STEAMER QUEEN, GULF OF GEORGIA, Aug. 10.

The salmon canneries of Alaska are not all in the neighborhood of the towns at which the excursion steamer calls, but are at or near every considerable stream which flows into the straits, channels and inlets. The instinct of the fish send them at regular seasons into fresh water, where and near which, they are caught in vast numbers. Other steamers, some of them carrying passengers and requiring a week longer to make the trip, call at stated times at several places, to which the Queen does not go, to take on and unload freight. The natives are the principal fishermen using, both nets and hooks from their trim canoes. These are dug out from a single log, some barely holding a man, others carrying with safety fifty or more. A log of two feet diameter will make a canoe nearly twice as large at its waist. When dug out to a thin shell almost as light as birch bark, the frame is filled with water, into which hot stones are thrown until the wooden walls are thoroughly steamed, hot and pliable. Sticks of different lengths, the longest at the canoe waist, are then set into the frame, which is spread out into a fine, cutter-shaped keel. A high prow and somewhat raised stern are cut out of the log or set into it. Some of the crafts present finely modeled keels. The shell of a canoe holding over sixty people, is often less than a half inch thick, and so light that two people can easily pull it high on dry land. The native squats in the bottom of his canoe and paddles it with great speed.

We saw a boat not twenty feet long, the whole filled to the top with light firewood. On this were perched two men, three women, a dog, a small tent, and the cooking utensils of the family. They were sailing from Juneau to another village several miles away. A native gets into his canoe as lightly and carefully as if he were treading on eggs. In this instance, the boat sank until its upper line was not four inches out of water. We expected to see it swamped, for there was a light wind and a few white caps. We watched it with our glasses until safely landed at a village several miles away. The natives, of villages quite distant from the towns at which the steamers call, bring their wives, dogs, and household utensils, together with what they may have to sell in the curio line to these places on the day the steamers are due. They pitch their tents on the shore not far from the steamboat pier, draw their canoes upon the strand above high water mark, and seem as much at home as if regularly domiciled. They remain as long as they see a chance for trade and then fold their tents and silently steal away. They require only a few minutes to get themselves and their worldly possessions aboard their little dugouts. At Juneau there were several of these temporary inhabitants. They all embarked after sundown, and with the long twilight were able to reach their permanent abodes before well-set dark.

The people catch fish at or near their respective villages. The canneries each have a small steambarge, which is sent to several villages daily to pick up the catch. In this way the salmon are landed at the packing-places when perfectly fresh. The Alaskan salmon is as a rule small, averaging only about six pounds, while "sock eye" of the Frazer River run evenly at eight pounds, and the Columbia River furnishes an average of nearly twenty pounds. Large fish, however, were brought to our steward, also magnificent halibut, which the passengers enjoyed greatly. One soon becomes satiated with salmon on the Pacific Coast. It is as thoroughly an every day food, as is the hog and hominy on a southern plantation. Except to the Indian, it does not seem to be as good for a steady diet as the southerner's homely fare. Several other varieties of salt water fish furnish a less surfeiting every day food than this famous beauty. We hailed with pleasure, the change to halibut given us by our steward when we reached Alaska. No where is this solid denizen of the sea, found in better kelter than up here.

A PICTURE OF SITKA.

Our ship on the excursion stops at Seattle and Port-Townsend, in Washington; Victoria and Nanaimo, on Vancouver's Island; and at Fort Wrangle, Juneau, and Sitka, in Alaska; at each long enough to afford passengers full time to satisfy themselves. Juneau is the largest place owing to the rich mines in the vicinity. All have large canneries near by, which employ natives, many of whom have acquired considerable property. A native woman, widow to a white trader, and her daughter were passengers from Juneau to Chilkat. She is a sort of Merchant, continuing the business of her defunct husband. She bore herself most decorously in her half mourning, and seemed quite able to steer her own bark through the remaining voyage of life. She is reputed to be worth several thousand dollars, and manages her affairs shrewdly. Her eligibility was suggested to the late friend of Persia's shah. His eyes rested more fondly upon her plump daughter, who displayed much agility and a trim ankle when she descended the gangway in a high sea out side of Chilkat.

Sitka has one of the prettiest sites and harbors in the world, and its climate just now is simply delicious. It is built on slightly rising ground on a bay running some miles from the sea, with beautiful little islands, clustered in large number in front of the town. These lift with rounded rocky foundations naked and water-washed at low tide, but are clothed in rich green shrubbery above high water mark. They would make an exquisite water park for a large city. Over one edge of this park lifts a few miles away, Mount Edgecumbe, a perfect volcanic cone about 3,000 feet high. Its lower two thirds are clothed in green. Its upper third, beneath its broad extinct crater, is of rich red rock. Long points of the red run down into the green, while points of the green run up into the red. It reminds one much of famous Fuji-yama in Japan. The god-mountain of Japan is over four times as high, but Edgecumbe is seen so close that the contrast does not entirely belittle it.

Around and behind Sitka are lofty foot hills clothed in forests, making a perfect amphitheater, while behind them rear pointed, rocky mountains more or less snow flecked. The town is on the great island of Baranoff, which is a mass of pinnacled mountains, the northern slopes of which are always white with sheets of snow. When we sailed, a few days before, northward through Prince Frederick Sound, these mountains formed a wonderfully beautiful background. Prince Frederick Sound is about twenty by thirty odd miles. All around it lie grand mountains of exceeding ruggedness on their highest peaks, but green below, with stripes, bands and patches of white. Through a break to the south the sound stretches some miles further, backed by the Baranoff range, rising in innumerable sharply pointed pinnacles, and about their shoulders as purely white as loftiest Alpine heights. All the mountains are comparatively uncovered when seen on their southern, western, and eastern exposures, while those seen from the north although not more lofty, are clothed in blankets of white, as if to protect them from the northern blasts.

The entire Alaskan trip presents a constant succession of gorgeous scenery, and if the weather be fine, it is worth the time taken and the cost in money to one who loves the picturesque and enjoys the rugged grandeur of nature, even if they were no grand glaciers. The time is not far distant, when commodious hotels will be maintained in these northern possessions as summer resorts. Many people will then spend weeks in them, and with the aid of small excursion barges will find health and delights.

An intelligent man who has resided for several years in Sitka, assured me he much preferred its winter climate to that of southern Ohio, where he had grown up to mature manhood. The average winter climate is rather milder than that of Washington, but with no extreme of cold. The frequent rainy days during the summer are a great draw back to the pleasure of excursion tourists. The chances are decidedly that he will find everything wet when he arrives. Our party was one of the lucky ones. The air was clear and balmy. The sun made a parasol agreeable to the ladies. I lolled for an hour on the stoop of a deserted house, with my head in shade, but my body and lower limbs warmed by a delicious sun bath, while my eyes feasted upon the glorious picture spread before me of mountain peak and green slopes, and gently rippling water as the tide slowly crept up the soft beach of the little bay behind the town.

Except when sailing across four entrances or broad straits running out to the open sea, the entire voyage to and from Alaska, usually is and always may be through straits, canals, and fiords so thoroughly protected from the ocean's angry waters that the smallest steamer can hardly feel a toss. On this excursion of ours, the briny depths below us were often as smooth as glass, reflecting the mountains, as from a mirror. As the swell from our steamer would roll off in smooth, rounded and diverging lines, they would weave fantastic forms, upon their mirror like surface, of green forest, rugged rocks, or snow caps. Towards the land beyond the effect of the swell, the mountains would often be so perfectly delineated upon the mirror, that a photograph of them would show them as distinctly below as above. The picture could be turned upside down with but little detriment to the view. Near the steamer the rounded crest of the swell would reflect long weird lines of forest, which would spread out behind us as the swell sank to a lower level.

At night millions of small fish, probably herrings, would be disturbed in their schools, and fluttering and hurrying from the ship's prow would make the water blaze in brilliant phosphorescence. Now and then a large fish would dart through these schools, leaving behind him a bright wake of flame. As he dashed through them, the herrings would scatter their flame work into myriads of sparkling diamonds. When our ship would push into the school, the alarm seemed to be given to quite a distance in the mass. The dense pack of little fellows forward the ship's bow, would break the sea into chaotic burning mass, as they sped in haste before the great monster chasing them. The line to the right and left then bent aft, weaving the sea into a waving network of fire. Farther off the brightness was toned down to a glistening shimmer, and then was lost in the distance. The schools we saw were moving in great lines in the direction we were sailing. They were composed of millions of little finny flutterers.

PANORAMA ON LAND AND WATER.

Frequently as we sailed over the placid sea, little diving ducks would flap the waters in a race from the ship's hull, and when a hundred feet off would dive for a score or more feet, perfectly satisfied that by their dive they had hidden their tracks from the mighty monster. Droves of porpoise rolled about us, and now and then one would race with us for a mile or so and seem really to understand and enjoy the contest. Asiatic crows cawed around us when we were ashore most familiarly, and with the cute impudence, so characteristic of his brethren in Eastern Asia. When we landed at Muir Glacier, a young school marm and I wandered along the shore then bare from the receding tide, up to the icy precipice. A couple of crows espied us and flew about us cawing, and finally perched on a rock close by. I told the fair one that these birds instinctively saw that we were to be caught by the incoming tide or under an ice fall, and were awaiting a feast. Their cawing was so constant, that she become superstitious, and declared she could not stand it. I had to shy a pebble at them to allay her timidity. The crow is a familiar bird up here, but the raven is an Alaskan institution. If I be not mistaken he is held by the natives in a sort of veneration. He is twice or more as large as our crow; has a huge roman nosed beak, which occasionally snaps with a report nearly as loud as the snaps of a pelican's bill. His coat is of shiny, burnished bottle green black, and his eye has an expression queerly mixed of vacuous imbecility, and cunning impudent rascality. He is a genuine stump speaker, and as fond of his own orations as a famous eastern after dinner talker is of his pretty speeches.

When we strolled in the deep shade of the dense forest behind Sitka, some of these impudent fellows settled in adjoining trees and held dialogues and debates, possibly upon our human characteristics. They would harange and then seem to crack coarse jokes, when one of them would almost laugh in low gutturals, not unlike the gurgling of water running from a two gallon jug. A wag among us declared they were making ward stump-speeches, and was willing to wager that if ravens language could be understood, we should find that some of the jokes were utterly unfit for polite ears. Those we saw were rather jolly good fellows, and were not of the family of which one appeared to Edgar Poe in his hashish dreams.

I said that the simple, beautiful scenery presented by the Alaskan excursion, well repays the loss of time and money expended upon it. Many of the mountain-flanked channels are wonderfully beautiful. The Linn or Chilkat Canal is surpassed by nothing of the sort we have ever seen. It is about four miles wide and probably 30 long. On either side tower mountains, say 3,000 feet high, rising from the water like great receding buttresses, clothed thickly in forest below, with scattered copses toward the upper slopes, and flecked with openings of low shrubbery in pale green, artistically contrasting with the dark tone of firs and spruce. All are topped by rocks, those near us gray, and the most distant ones of an undertone of purple, while in the far distance, the mountains on either shore become first blue-gray, and then blend off into sweet opalescent tints. Over and above all, towered at no great distance mighty snow fields and glaciered heights. Crillon, Fairweather, and La Peronse to the west cut the clear blue sky with their points 15,000 and nearly 16,000 feet above us; mantels of clouds here and there fell about their titanic shoulders, and light veils of mist wound and unwound about them just under their snowy pinnacles. Into this glorious fiord we steamed to its head at Chilkat, and then back to enter Glacier Bay, the acme of Alaska's wonderful exhibitions.

Fully nine Alaskan tourists out of ten go for its glaciers, which are seen in a magnitude and grandeur inducing one to pass as scarcely worthy of notice, the best of any other country which is possible of approach. They are seen in icy hardness on distant summits shortly after passing the boundary of British Columbia. They increase in frequency as one goes further north, until on a clear and cloudless day one is scarcely ever out of sight. The first visited by us was that at the head of Takou inlet south of Juneau. It is comparatively small, less than a mile wide at its foot, but running back several miles. Its foot presents a perpendicular wall of ice 150 to 200 feet high, rising out of water several hundred feet deep. Its face is irregular; here supported by icy buttresses, and there sinking back into icy recesses; now with irregular pilasters and projections of soft snowy appearance and then with broken columns, recesses, and caves of every tint of blue from the flitting opalescent to transparent ultra-marine and deep indigo.

FANTASTIC GRANDEUR OF THE GLACIERS.

Now is seen a mass of closely welded crystals of diamond whiteness glistening under the kiss of the sun, like monster piles of precious gems; then a huge broken and fissured wall compactly studded with turquoise and amethysts and gems so green as to be almost emeralds forming the icy cliffs. Loud reports as of rifle guns would fill the ear, coming from the cracking behind of the solid moving mass as it pushed onward in its descent. Hark! A rattle of musketry! You look and see a mere hat full of snowy ice tumbling from the upper edge. As it falls it becomes a cart full, a house full, and then with a report as loud as that of a heavy cannon, a section of the wall's face separates from the mass behind and tumbles into the deep water with a splash which scatters spray one or two hundred feet around, and the air is filled as with the bellowing of thunder echoed from projecting ice walls and from the lofty mountains hemming in the narrow inlet. The fallen mass disappears below the surface. But look! See that monster lifting from the water a half hundred feet away from where the tumbling ice fell! It is a dome-like pinnacle of ice. Up it rises slowly, revealing the most exquisite tints as its shoulders broaden; ten feet, twenty, fifty, aye, nearly a hundred feet! For a moment it poses a solidified mass of ultramarine. Sparkling waters pour in cascades from its uplifted dome. But see! It leans a little; it leans a little more; and tumbles with a mighty noise and sends geysers up to the brink of the icy precipice and wide around for several hundred feet. As its upper member or crest topples over, a huge section many times more bulky than the part we had seen above water, lifts, and then lies stretched three or more hundred feet, and exposed above the surface nearly thirty feet. The huge mass of possibly a hundred thousand tons weight came only to a small extent from the icy wall standing before and above us; but the fissure above extended--three or more hundred feet down into the glacier below water, and rested on the ground. For one end was covered with mud and for many feet was deeply stained.

An officer of the ship declared this was the finest exhibition of the sort he had ever seen, and that the iceberg thus made and now slowly floated out by the receding tide weighed far more than a hundred thousand tons. Our ship was lying with its bow toward the glacier not a thousand feet away. The vessel rocked and reeled from stem to stern as the great waves made by the glacier avalanche rolled under her. We lay there two hours listening to constant reports and seeing a succession of ice slides. While so resting for the enjoyment of passengers, the captain was laying in ice enough for his next round trip. Icebergs of all sizes, from those weighing only a ton up to others half as big as the steamer, were floating all about us. Some of crystal whiteness and as clear as the lens of a telescope. Others were of every tone of blue, deepening sometimes into translucent olive. The most of the bergs were of delicious purity, but a few were full of mud brought from the bed hundreds of feet under water. In some were seen good sized cobble stones; in one a boulder weighing probably a quarter of a ton. Sailors in a boat picked from these masses chunks of perfect clearness, passed grappling ropes under them, and then hoisted them by the steam derrick upon the main deck. Sometimes the piece seen above water was not larger than a barrel, but when lifted into full view it weighed one, two or more tons. For every foot of ice seen in an iceberg above water eight lie below. Thus when a berg floated close to us showing thirty feet above water, it had, if of even form, 240 feet below.

CLIMBING THE FAMOUS "MUIR."

Some of the passengers felt uneasy, fearing another mighty tumble might occur immediately in front of us, and that the mass might shoot outward below water, and might come up beneath, or uncomfortably close to us. The captain, however, stood upon the bridge ready to send his ship rapidly backward should anything look untoward. The engines were kept in gentle motion holding our bow steadily toward the glacier precipice. The captain, by the way, thinks the Takou the most interesting of the approachable glaciers. The ice gathered was of great solidity. It did not break under an ice pick in straight cleavage, but irregularly, showing its peculiar characteristic of being formed, not from water simply freezing, but from snow compacted under irresistible pressure. Two chunks of perhaps each two tons weight lay between decks supplying the entire ship's wants for four or five days. It may have been imagination, but I thought this ice more agreeable for eating than that made by ordinary process. It was more friable and broke and crumbled in the mouth in shorter pieces and not in long spiculae as ordinary ice does.

We passed on our run close to several other huge glaciers, some of them running quite down to the water; among them the "Stephens" which though very large, reaches the sea in a slope and not with a perpendicular precipice. We, however, stopped only at the celebrated "Muir." We lay in front of it from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.--a half hour in rather dangerous proximity, and then anchored a mile off for passengers to land and climb its banks. The Muir presents a precipice to the head of the inlet nearly 300 feet high and over a mile long. Two years ago it bent outward with a very decided convex front; last year it was nearly straight. Now it is a very open horseshoe. We took soundings when the Queen lay a thousand feet from the front and found under us 720 feet. It possibly shallows considerably close to the wall, say to 400 feet. The glacier is certainly over 200 feet high; this makes, with what is under water, 600 feet. But give it the low estimate of an average across the inlet of 400 feet. It moves steadily downward forty feet a day, and gradually recedes. Thus it will be found that it tumbles into the sea a mass of ice, 40 x 5280 x 400 feet, or of at least 84,000,000 cubic feet a day.

After wandering for several hours over the surface of the glacier, along a sort of granite road way varying in depth from a few inches up to very many feet thick lying upon it; among blocks of granite weighing tons brought down upon the solid frozen river; across narrow crevices, into whose depths we could look a hundred feet down, into pure ice of all tints of blue from the pearl blue of a southern sky to ultramarine and indigo--tints so beautiful that one involuntarily groaned in pleased admiration; along chasms where our iron-pointed alpenstocks were necessary to prevent a slip, which would have sent us down into glacial graves; looking over pinnacles, domes and valleys of ice in confused profusion; over grotesque forms, over which no one person could safely go, but a dozen attached to each other by ropes, with shoes iron-nailed, might with hazard venture. Then up and before us spread the mighty glacier, 25 miles by 30, fed by many smaller ones. Morains of rock lifted above the surface in long even lines running back for miles, showing the edge of each of the frozen rivers, which have united to make the mighty single one.

The theory explaining the medial moraines of glaciers, is that two or more glaciers come down the gorges and upper valleys of the mountain. Each of these gather up broken rock and mountain debris on their two sides. When two such glaciers meet and run into and form one, then the inner lateral moraines unite and are borne along by the enlarged glacier. As it flows these two morains, now become "medial," are apparently pressed upward to and upon the surface. This, however, is probably only apparent, for the ice melting under the summer sun's heat, simply leaves the rock debris on the surface.

The Muir is the result of several upper feeding glaciers. Each two uniting formed from their inner lateral moraines, one medial. Several medial ones are observable on the surface of the great glacier, some of them uniting lower down, when the bed of the icy stream becomes contracted--where the valley becomes narrow. Several medial moraines retain their individual line until the great precipice is reached. The mass of the debris forming a moraine is of comparatively small broken granite; not broken and rounded by glacial action, but simply irregular pieces thrown off from granite precipices high in the mountains by frost forces. Now and then a few rounded pebbles, and small boulders are seen, worn on the under surface of upper glacier streams. Quite a number of very large masses of granite are being borne down by the Muir moraines. One I estimated to weigh several tons. Its cleavage sides and edges were fresh and sharp as if it were just broken from its parent rock.

The medial morains on some of the glaciers seen at a distance, have a singular effect. They can be seen in long apparently parallel lines and seemingly close enough together, to be the walls of a long smooth road. A wag declared that one of them was the road from an Indian village to the little red school house in an upper valley.

After exploring the surface of the glacier, we found that the tide having reached its ebb, we could approach the foot of the ice-precipice. Three of us had approached it somewhat nearly before when the tide was but half out. We walked up the shingly shore through stranded icebergs of all sizes, and hundreds in number. Some were not larger than a barrel, others larger than a railroad car, and of all intermediate sizes. Now we threaded our way through a cordon of huge blocks as clear as crystal, from which we chipped with the spikes of our alpenstocks, chunks delicious to eat. Then we were among others of various tints, colored by the earthy matter caught by them when flowing near to or upon the valley bed. One mass weighing probably a thousand tons was resting upon a point so small as to be a mere pivot. I cut from it a smooth rounded cobble stone for a paper weight, and was glad when my task was finished, for I was somewhat uneasy lest the slight hammering might topple over the bulky mass.

We reached the foot of the glacier. Here the picture was wonderfully fine. The ice-precipice from which so many newly broken bergs had tumbled, was far more beautiful than when seen from several hundred yards away. We looked into grottoes many yards recessed into the frozen cliff. Here in one was every shade of blue; all tints of green were resplendent in another; and then the sun would discolor these shades, and weave them into the sweet tones which paint an opal's cheek. Now an upper member of a newly broken recess under the sun rays sparkled as a million diamonds, and then another looked like a mass of crystalized olive tints. From out of a deep grotto at the base of the cliff flowed a strong river, which had been pent within its icy house, and now reaching the free air bounded and rushed to join the mighty sea.

Since our arrival in the morning the tide had fallen fully twenty feet, taking away considerable support from the hanging mass, so that the fall of icebergs was almost continuous. The thunder while so close to a tumbling mass was terrific and sublime. The inlet was full of bergs, so that the ship in turning out had to pick its way carefully. How exquisitely beautiful they were as they glistened in the sun's rays, displaying their iridescent crystals! As we steamed out of the inlet among a scattered ice floe we thought we had seen all that a grand glacier could present. Imagine our surprise when we had gone about ten miles to find ourselves at the entrance to another inlet which was packed almost solidly with icebergs. With our glasses we could see the huge "Pacific glacier," about thirty miles away, with a precipice of ice 600 to 800 feet high and five miles long. Although it was quite three times as far from us as the "Muir", yet its icy front showed to us higher out of water. The inlet running up to it was literally packed with ice, into which no steamer, unless armored for Arctic seas, would dare to venture.

A passenger lately taken on, who had spent a season prospecting in this immediate neighborhood, assured us that the fall of ice from this glacier was absolutely continuous, and that masses would tumble a half mile long. He had seen one floating three miles long. He admitted he had no means of measuring it, and gave us the result of a rather hasty guess. He said it stranded at each low tide, but would be lifted at each flood and was by degrees broken up sufficiently to get out of the inlet. "Why," said this passenger, "the Muir is a baby by the side of the Pacific. For every iceberg coming from the one five hundred come from the other." The statement was credible, for while just above this inlet the strait had only scattered bergs, below it was almost a pack of ice. The majority of the icebergs, which had fallen from the Muir, were melted away before reaching the mouth of the Pacific inlet. Looking up this, the icebergs seemed almost in solid mass; of all sizes from a few feet broad, to others covering a quarter of an acre; and from a few feet in height up to twenty, thirty and forty. Out side of the inlet and below its mouth, monster masses were all about us, some of them hundreds of feet across and several fully fifty feet above water.

The George W. Elder, which sailed from Tacoma the night we did, reached the Muir while we were there and sailed out with us. We thus had a genuine Arctic picture. The two ships picked their way slowly, less than a mile apart. The Elder was frequently hidden from us entirely by mighty icebergs. For miles we stole our way through the floe, delighted with the novel scene. Two fine ships in this icy sea gave us a realization of the pictures we had seen of the Thetis and her comrade in the frozen pack beyond the Arctic circle. Mighty Crillon, Fairweather, and La Perouse the sources of the great fields of frozen snow around us here pour their icy floods into the sea. The last is 14,000 feet high; the others respectively 15,900 and 15,500. They present the same amount of white above the snow line as does Mount Everest. That is about 12,000 feet on its southern slope. In Alaska the snow line toward the south is reached at 3,000 feet, while in the Himalayas the tree line mounts to 17,000 feet.

When I looked upon these great icebergs which had tumbled from the huge ice-cliffs we had lately seen, and then recalled the fact that they were but snow balls when compared to some which have been sighted in far northern and in southern seas--some which were from two to three miles square and seven to eight hundred feet high above water, and nearly if not quite a mile deep below the water line--when I recalled these facts I was lost in trying to speculate upon the vastness of the glaciers existing in Greenland and in Antarctic continents. Judging from what we know of those about us, we have to suppose there are glaciers in the world two or three aye six or seven miles high above water, sinking miles below the surface, and stretching in awful grandeur their frozen cliffs for many miles along the sea.

The Pacific glacier is from six to eight hundred feet high at its brink, and five miles long, yet among the bergs we saw--and the captain said he had never seen a finer display in the locality--there were none which were a half acre in size and none over sixty feet high. Icebergs are said to have been seen covering an area of from 2,500 to 4,000 acres, and twelve times as high as the highest about us. The glacier from which such monsters fell, was to the "Muir" as Niagara is to a mill dam. Are the mighty snow and ice mountains of the far south growing, or are they melting and breaking away from their moorings? If growing, when will they tumble through the crust of the earth, and send a raging sea over the habitable part of the globe? A guaranteed ticket for a berth in the coming Noah's ark may be a handy thing to have about the house. With one, the possessor could be quite content to let the other fellow do the swimming.

What a grand mind picture is presented to us, when we realize that glaciers once covered the northern half of this continent--glaciers whose sources were about Baffins Bay and within the Arctic circle, and whose feet stretched from the Alleghanies to the Rocky mountains--from Pennsylvania to Colorado! glaciers so vast that they built up moraines over a thousand feet deep! It is these thoughts which show us man's littleness and his vanity in boasting himself fashioned in God's image.

A good clergyman we met in the National Park, in all seriousness expressed a fear that the enormous sky scrapers our people are erecting in Chicago might destroy the equilibrium of the earth, and cause it to oscillate eccentrically upon its axis. A conscientious Chicagoan informed his reverence, that we were building our city of such weight that it would counterbalance the undue growth of ice mountains about the southern pole.

CLIMATE OF THE FROZEN REGION.

We have a pleasant company aboard--several being from Chicago. There is less of stiffness than is generally found on ocean steamers. There is an amusing party of over twenty from the city of brotherly love. They are all nice--very nice, and evidently have made a vow to hold themselves aloof from all others. They sit on deck in rows four deep, and follow the lead of one lady as a sort of bell-wether. When she smiles all laugh; when she feels a cold in her head all sneeze.

Perhaps I should say something further about the climate of our frozen territory. Few things are less understood. The Sitka winters are not unlike those of Norfolk, Va., rarely getting much below freezing. The nights there are very long, as the days are in summer. The sun was hot while we were there, but the shades were delicious. Three blankets were quite comfortable at night. In the straits and inlets the weather is not quite so mild as on the open seashore, but nowhere are there severe winters until the coast mountain range is crossed. There the sun in the summer days is piercing hot and mosquitoes are so thick that they are almost unbearable. There the long winters lock everything up in thick ribbed ice.

We know that nothing can be more delightful than what we found for summer. However, we have been fortunate. The rainfall is great and rains and fogs frequent. We have escaped both. Warm clothing, umbrellas, waterproofs, and water-tight shoes are recommended by those who advise how to go to Alaska. We have needed neither except the shoes when climbing the glacier. We have worn overcoats aboard ship when the wind was against us, for a slight breeze and the wind made by the speed of the ship causes a decided chilliness when on deck. When the ship is lying still we have required no extra clothing.

We expect to reach Nanaimo early to-morrow morning where the ship will coal. I hope we will be in early enough for myself and daughter to catch the little steamer running to Vancouver.

Before closing, however, permit me to give one of the most valuable points in the art of traveling. When you leave home drop its cares entirely and trustfully. Let your friends write nothing about your business unless it be such as they know should hurry you back and for that intended. Look on the bright side of everything before you, and do not complain because you have not the comforts of your home. Profitable travel is often laborious, and like all well applied labor, pays. As a young man I spent two years abroad and heard not a word as to my affairs. Since then I have made three trips to Europe and a long one around the world. Not a word on either of them did I hear of my business. Once a month during a Globe Circuit we received a cablegram telling us of the health of the loved ones at home.

To this policy I have ascribed the happiness and much of the benefits received. People we met in various quarters of the world looked regularly for and got advices on their affairs and were often uneasy and miserable, but were powerless to correct anything going wrong. Passengers on this ship are fretting about letters they expect to get at Victoria. I have heard nothing for a month and expect nothing until I wire home. If one keeps himself hopeful he can adopt as his traveling motto, "No news is good news." Try this and you will confess you owe me a good fee for sound advice.