f Denver and the West. Their wives accompanied them and they were to
spend a month with us.

Standing a little apart from them as the steamboat drew to the dock, his
peering blue eyes already eagerly scanning the islands and mountains,
was a lean, sinewy man of forty, with waving, reddish-brown hair and
beard, and shoulders slightly stooped. He wore a Scotch cap and a long,
gray tweed ulster, which I have always since associated with him, and
which seemed the same garment, unsoiled and unchanged, that he wore
later on his northern trips. He was introduced as Professor Muir, the
Naturalist. A hearty grip of the hand, and we seemed to coalesce at once
in a friendship which, to me at least, has been one of the very best
things I have known in a life full of blessings. From the first he was
the strongest and most attractive of these four fine personalities to
me, and I began to recognize him as my Master who was to lead me into
enchanting regions of beauty and mystery, which without his aid must
forever have remained unseen by the eyes of my soul. I sat at his feet;
and at the feet of his spirit I still sit, a student, absorbed,
surrendered, as this "priest of Nature's inmost shrine" unfolds to me
the secrets of his "mountains of God."

[Illustration: FORT WRANGELL

Near the mouth of the Stickeen--the starting point of the expeditions]

Minor excursions culminated in the chartering of the little steamer
_Cassiar_, on which our party, augmented by two or three friends,
steamed between the tremendous glaciers and through the columned canyons
of the swift Stickeen River through the narrow strip of Alaska's
cup-handle to Glenora, in British Columbia, one hundred and fifty miles
from the river's mouth. Our captain was Nat. Lane, a grandson of the
famous Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon. Stocky, broad-shouldered,
muscular, given somewhat to strange oaths and strong liquids, and eying
askance our group as we struck the bargain, he was withal a genial,
good-natured man, and a splendid river pilot.

Dropping down from Telegraph Creek (so named because it was a principal
station of the great projected trans-American and trans-Siberian line of
the Western Union, that bubble pricked by Cyrus Field's cable), we tied
up at Glenora about noon of a cloudless day.

"Amuse yourselves," said Captain Lane at lunch. "Here we stay till two
o'clock to-morrow morning. This gale, blowing from the sea, makes safe
steering through the Canyon impos