e sea-level, always running through forest. Then,
naturally enough, we came down, but we dropped two thousand two hundred
feet in about thirteen miles. It was not so much the grinding of the
brakes along the train, or the sight of three curves of track apparently
miles below us, or even the vision of a goods-train apparently just
under our wheels, or even the tunnels, that made me reflect; it was the
trestles over which we crawled,--trestles something over a hundred feet
high and looking like a collection of match-sticks.

"I guess our timber is as much a curse as a blessing," said the old man
from Southern California. "These trestles last very well for five or six
years; then they get out of repair, and a train goes through 'em, or
else a forest fire burns 'em up."

This was said in the middle of a groaning, shivering trestle. An
occasional plate-layer took a look at us as we went down, but that
railway didn't waste men on inspection duty. Very often there were
cattle on the track, against which the engine used a diabolical form of
whistling. The old man had been a driver in his youth, and beguiled the
way with cheery anecdotes of what might be expected if we fouled a young
calf.

"You see, they get their legs under the cow-catcher and that'll put an
engine off the line. I remember when a hog wrecked an excursion-train
and killed sixty people. 'Guess the engineer will look out, though."

There is considerably too much guessing about this large nation. As one
of them put it rather forcibly: "We guess a trestle will stand for ever,
and we guess that we can patch up a washout on the track, and we guess
the road's clear, and sometimes we guess ourselves into the _deepot_,
and sometimes we guess ourselves into Hell."

* * * * *

The descent brought us far into Oregon and a timber and wheat country.
We drove through wheat and pine in alternate slices, but pine chiefly,
till we reached Portland, which is a city of fifty thousand, possessing
the electric light of course, equally, of course, devoid of pavements,
and a port of entry about a hundred miles from the sea at which big
steamers can load. It is a poor city that cannot say it has no equal on
the Pacific coast. Portland shouts this to the pines which run down from
a thousand-foot ridge clear up to the city. You may sit in a bedizened
bar-room furnished with telephone and clicker, and in half an hour be in
the woods.

Portland produc