closer together, and the backgrounds are higher and far more extensive.
Here, too, we find greater variety amid the marvelous wealth of islands
and inlets, and also in the changing views dependent on the weather.
As we double cape after cape and round the uncounted islands, new
combinations come to view in endless variety, sufficient to fill and
satisfy the lover of wild beauty through a whole life.

Oftentimes in the stillest weather, when all the winds sleep and no sign
of storms is felt or seen, silky clouds form and settle over all the
land, leaving in sight only a circle of water with indefinite bounds
like views in mid-ocean; then, the clouds lifting, some islet will be
presented standing alone, with the tops of its trees dipping out of
sight in pearly gray fringes; or, lifting higher, and perhaps letting in
a ray of sunshine through some rift overhead, the whole island will be
set free and brought forward in vivid relief amid the gloom, a girdle of
silver light of dazzling brightness on the water about its shores, then
darkening again and vanishing back into the general gloom. Thus island
after island may be seen, singly or in groups, coming and going from
darkness to light like a scene of enchantment, until at length the
entire cloud ceiling is rolled away, and the colossal cone of Mount
Rainier is seen in spotless white looking down over the forests from
a distance of sixty miles, but so lofty and so massive and clearly
outlined as to impress itself upon us as being just back of a strip of
woods only a mile or two in breadth.

For the tourist sailing to Puget Sound from San Francisco there is but
little that is at all striking in the scenery within reach by the way
until the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca is reached. The voyage
is about four days in length and the steamers keep within sight of the
coast, but the hills fronting the sea up to Oregon are mostly bare
and uninviting, the magnificent redwood forests stretching along this
portion of the California coast seeming to keep well back, away from
the heavy winds, so that very little is seen of them; while there are
no deep inlets or lofty mountains visible to break the regular monotony.
Along the coast of Oregon the woods of spruce and fir come down to the
shore, kept fresh and vigorous by copious rains, and become denser and
taller to the northward until, rounding Cape Flattery, we enter the
Strait of Fuca, where, sheltered from the ocean gales, the fo