country that the next bend
denied; for, lo! we were running under a triple tier of fortifications,
lava-topped, pine-clothed, and terrible. Behind them the white dome of
Mount Hood ran fourteen thousand feet into the blue, and at their feet
the river threshed among a belt of cottonwood trees. There I sat down
and looked at California half out of the boat in his anxiety to see both
sides of the river at once. He had seen my note-book, and it offended
him. "Young feller, let her go--and you shut your head. It's not you nor
anybody like you can put this down. Black, the novelist, he could. He
can describe salmon-fishing, _he_ can." And he glared at me as though he
expected me to go and do likewise.

"I can't. I know it," I said humbly.

"Then thank God that you came along this way."

We reached a little railway, on an island, which was to convey us to a
second steamer, because, as the purser explained, the river was "a
trifle broken." We had a six-mile run, sitting in the sunshine on a
dummy wagon, whirled just along the edge of the river-bluffs. Sometimes
we dived into the fragrant pine woods, ablaze with flowers; but we
generally watched the river now narrowed into a turbulent millrace. Just
where the whole body of water broke in riot over a series of cascades,
the United States Government had chosen to build a lock for steamers,
and the stream was one boiling, spouting mob of water. A log shot down
the race, struck on a rock, split from end to end, and rolled over in
white foam. I shuddered because my toes were not more than sixty feet
above the log, and I feared that a stray splinter might have found me.
But the train ran into the river on a sort of floating trestle, and I
was upon another steamer ere I fully understood why. The cascades were
not two hundred yards below us, and when we cast off to go upstream, the
rush of the river, ere the wheel struck the water, dragged us as though
we had been towed. Then the country opened out; and California mourned
for his lost bluffs and crags, till we struck a rock wall four hundred
feet high, crowned by the gigantic figure of a man watching us. On a
rocky island we saw the white tomb of an old-time settler who had made
his money in San Francisco, but had chosen to be buried in an Indian
burying-ground. A decayed wooden "wickyup," where the bones of the
Indian dead are laid, almost touched the tomb. The river ran into a
canal of basaltic rock, painted in yellow, vermilion, an