never I look at it I think of the falling
dusk in Fort Wrangell, and of the child on all-fours who startled me on
my return from the chief's house beyond the bridge, and who cried as if
her little heart would break when I paid for her plaything and cruelly
bore it away.

Some of the happiest hours of the voyage were the "wee sma'" ones, when
I lounged about the deserted deck with Captain George, the pilot. A
gentleman of vast experience and great reserve, for years he has haunted
that archipelago; he knows it in the dark, and it was his nightly duty
to pace the deck while the ship was almost as still as death. He has
heard the great singers of the past, the queens of song whose voices
were long since hushed. We talked of these in the vast silence of the
Alaskan night, and of the literature of the sea, and especially of that
solitary northwestern sea, while we picked our way among the unpeopled
islands that crowded all about us.

On such a night, while we were chatting in low voices as we leaned over
the quarter-rail, and the few figures that still haunted the deck were
like veritable ghosts, Captain George seized me by the arm and
exclaimed: "Look there!" I looked up into the northern sky. There was
not a cloud visible in all that wide expanse, but something more filmy
than a cloud floated like a banner among the stars. It might almost have
been a cobweb stretched from star to star--each strand woven from a star
beam,--but it was ever changing in form and color. Now it was
scarf-like, fluttering and waving in a gentle breeze; and now it hung
motionless--a deep fringe of lace gathered in ample folds. Anon it
opened suddenly from the horizon, and spread in panels like a fan that
filled the heavens. As it opened and shut and swayed to and fro as if it
were a fan in motion, it assumed in turn all the colors of the rainbow,
but with a delicacy of tint and texture even beyond that of the rainbow.
Sometimes it was like a series of transparencies--shadow pictures thrown
upon the screen of heaven, lit by a light beyond it--the mysterious
light we know not of. That is what the pilot and I saw while most of the
passengers were sleeping. It was the veritable _aurora borealis_, and
that alone were worth the trip to Alaska.

One day we came to Fort Tongass--a port of entry, and our last port in
the great, lone land--for all the way down through the British
possessions we touch no land until we reach Victoria or Nanaimo. Tongass
wa