roads are graded in
moraine material, among scratched and grooved rock bosses that are as
unweathered and telling as any to be found in the glacier channels of
Alaska. The harbor also is clearly of glacial origin. The rock islets
that rise here and there, forming so marked a feature of the harbor, are
unchanged roches moutonnees, and the shores are grooved, scratched, and
rounded, and in every way as glacial in all their characteristics as
those of a newborn glacial lake.

Most visitors to Victoria go to the stores of the Hudson's Bay Company,
presumably on account of the romantic associations, or to purchase a
bit of fur or some other wild-Indianish trinket as a memento. At certain
seasons of the year, when the hairy harvests are gathered in, immense
bales of skins may be seen in these unsavory warehouses, the spoils of
many thousand hunts over mountain and plain, by lonely river and shore.
The skins of bears, wolves, beavers, otters, fishers, martens, lynxes,
panthers, wolverine, reindeer, moose, elk, wild goats, sheep, foxes,
squirrels, and many others of our "poor earth-born companions and fellow
mortals" may here be found.

Vancouver is the southmost and the largest of the countless islands
forming the great archipelago that stretches a thousand miles to the
northward. Its shores have been known a long time, but little is known
of the lofty mountainous interior on account of the difficulties in
the way of explorations--lake, bogs, and shaggy tangled forests. It is
mostly a pure, savage wilderness, without roads or clearings, and silent
so far as man is concerned. Even the Indians keep close to the shore,
getting a living by fishing, dwelling together in villages, and
traveling almost wholly by canoes. White settlements are few and far
between. Good agricultural lands occur here and there on the edge of
the wilderness, but they are hard to clear, and have received but little
attention thus far. Gold, the grand attraction that lights the way into
all kinds of wildernesses and makes rough places smooth, has been found,
but only in small quantities, too small to make much motion. Almost all
the industry of the island is employed upon lumber and coal, in which,
so far as known, its chief wealth lies.

Leaving Victoria for Port Townsend, after we are fairly out on the free
open water, Mount Baker is seen rising solitary over a dark breadth of
forest, making a glorious show in its pure white raiment. It is said
to be