r, we're going to see scenery now. You shout and sing,"
said California, when the bland wooded islands gave place to bolder
outlines, and the steamer ran herself into a hornet's nest of
black-fanged rocks not a foot below the boiling broken water. We were
trying to get up a slue, or back channel, by a short cut, and the
stern-wheel never spun twice in the same direction. Then we hit a
floating log with a jar that ran through our system, and then,
white-bellied, open-gilled, spun by a dead salmon--a lordly twenty-pound
Chinook salmon who had perished in his pride. "You'll see the
salmon-wheels 'fore long," said a man who lived "way back on the
Washoogle," and whose hat was spangled with trout-flies. "Those Chinook
salmon never rise to the fly. The canneries take them by the wheel." At
the next bend we sighted a wheel--an infernal arrangement of wire-gauze
compartments worked by the current and moved out from a barge in shore
to scoop up the salmon as he races up the river. California swore long
and fluently at the sight, and the more fluently when he was told of the
weight of a good night's catch--some thousands of pounds. Think of the
black and bloody murder of it! But you out yonder insist in buying
tinned salmon, and the canneries cannot live by letting down lines.

About this time California was struck with madness. I found him dancing
on the fore-deck shouting, "Isn't she a daisy? Isn't she a darling?" He
had found a waterfall--a blown thread of white vapour that broke from
the crest of a hill--a waterfall eight hundred and fifty feet high whose
voice was even louder than the voice of the river. "Bridal Veil," jerked
out the purser. "D--n that purser and the people who christened her! Why
didn't they call her Mechlin lace Falls at fifty dollars a yard while
they were at it?" said California. And I agreed with him. There are many
"bridal veil" falls in this country, but few, men say, lovelier than
those that come down to the Columbia River. Then the scenery
began--poured forth with the reckless profusion of Nature, who when she
wants to be amiable succeeds only in being oppressively magnificent. The
river was penned between gigantic stone walls crowned with the ruined
bastions of Oriental palaces. The stretch of green water widened and was
guarded by pine-clad hills three thousand feet high. A wicked devil's
thumb nail of rock shot up a hundred feet in midstream. A sand-bar of
blinding white sand gave promise of flat