es lumber and jig-saw fittings for houses, and beer and
buggies, and bricks and biscuit; and, in case you should miss the fact,
there are glorified views of the town hung up in public places with the
value of the products set down in dollars. All this is excellent and
exactly suitable to the opening of a new country; but when a man tells
you it is civilisation, you object. The first thing that the civilised
man learns to do is to keep the dollars in the background, because they
are only the oil of the machine that makes life go smoothly.

Portland is so busy that it can't attend to its own sewage or paving,
and the four-storey brick blocks front cobble-stones and plank sidewalks
and other things much worse. I saw a foundation being dug out. The
sewage of perhaps twenty years ago, had thoroughly soaked into the soil,
and there was a familiar and Oriental look about the compost that flew
up with each shovel-load. Yet the local papers, as was just and proper,
swore there was no place like Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., chronicled the
performances of Oregonians, "claimed" prominent citizens elsewhere as
Oregonians, and fought tooth and nail for dock, rail, and wharfage
projects. And you could find men who had thrown in their lives with the
city, who were bound up in it, and worked their life out for what they
conceived to be its material prosperity. Pity it is to record that in
this strenuous, labouring town there had been, a week before, a
shooting-case. One well-known man had shot another on the street, and
was now pleading self-defence because the other man had, or the murderer
thought he had, a pistol about him. Not content with shooting him dead,
he squibbed off his revolver into him as he lay. I read the pleadings,
and they made me ill. So far as I could judge, if the dead man's body
had been found with a pistol on it, the shooter would have gone free.
Apart from the mere murder, cowardly enough in itself, there was a
refinement of cowardice in the plea. Here in this civilised city the
surviving brute was afraid he would be shot--fancied he saw the other
man make a motion to his hip-pocket, and so on. Eventually the jury
disagreed. And the degrading thing was that the trial was reported by
men who evidently understood all about the pistol, was tried before a
jury who were versed in the etiquette of the hip-pocket, and was
discussed on the streets by men equally initiate.

But let us return to more cheerful things. The insu