here to see them. I'm learning nothing here that will do me
any good."

I spent the night with him, and we talked till long after midnight,
sailing anew our voyages of enchantment. He had just completed his work
of editing "Picturesque California" and gave me a set of the beautiful
volumes.

Our paths did not converge again for nine years; but I was to have,
after all, a few more Alaska days with John Muir. The itch of the
wanderlust in my feet had become a wearisome, nervous ache, increasing
with the years, and the call of the wild more imperative, until the
fierce yearning for the North was at times more than I could bear.

The first of the great northward gold stampedes--that of 1897 to the
Klondyke in Northwestern Canada on the borders of Alaska--afforded me
the opportunity for which I was longing to return to the land of my
heart. The latter part of August saw me on _The Queen_, the largest of
that great fleet of passenger boats that were traversing the thousand
miles of wonder and beauty between Seattle and Skagway. These steamboats
were all laden with gold seekers and their goods. Seattle sprang into
prominence and wealth, doubling her population in a few months. From
every community in the United States, from all Canada and from many
lands across the oceans came that strange mob of lawyers, doctors,
clerks, merchants, farmers, mechanics, engineers, reporters,
sharpers--all gold-struck--all mad with excitement--all rushing
pell-mell into a thousand new and hard experiences.

As I stood on the upper deck of the vessel, watching the strange scene
on the dock, who should come up the gang-plank but John Muir, wearing
the same old gray ulster and Scotch cap! It was the last place in the
world I would have looked for him. But he was not stampeding to the
Klondyke. His being there at that time was really an accident. In
company with two other eminent "tree-men" he had been spending the
summer in the study of the forests of Canada and the three were
"climaxing," as they said, in the forests of Alaska.

Five pleasurable days we had together on board _The Queen_. Muir was
vastly amused by the motley crowd of excited men, their various outfits,
their queer equipment, their ridiculous notions of camping and life in
the wilderness. "A nest of ants," he called them, "taken to a strange
country and stirred up with a stick."

As our steamboat touched at Port Townsend, Muir received a long telegram
from a San Francisco new