even now when
they laid new foundations the workmen unearth charred skeletons, many
more than fourteen. "That night," said the teller, "all Vancouver was
houseless. The wooden town had gone in a breath. Next day they began to
build in brick, and you have seen what they have achieved."

The sight afar off of three British men-of-war and a torpedo-boat
consoled me as I returned from Victoria to Tacoma and discovered _en
route_ that I was surfeited with scenery. There is a great deal in the
remark of a discontented traveller: "When you have seen a fine forest, a
bluff, a river, and a lake you have seen all the scenery of western
America. Sometimes the pine is three hundred feet high, and sometimes
the rock is, and sometimes the lake is a hundred miles long. But it's
all the same, don't you know. I'm getting sick of it." I dare not say
getting sick. I'm only tired. If Providence could distribute all this
beauty in little bits where people most wanted it,--among you in
India,--it would be well. But it is _en masse_, overwhelming, with
nobody but the tobacco-chewing captain of a river steamboat to look at
it. Men said if I went to Alaska I should see islands even more wooded,
snow-peaks loftier, and rivers more lovely than those around me. That
decided me not to go to Alaska. I went east--east to Montana, after
another horrible night in Tacoma among the men who spat. Why does the
Westerner spit? It can't amuse him, and it doesn't interest his
neighbour.

But I am beginning to mistrust. Everything good as well as everything
bad is supposed to come from the East. Is there a shooting-scrape
between prominent citizens? Oh, you'll find nothing of that kind in the
East. Is there a more than usually revolting lynching? They don't do
that in the East. I shall find out when I get there whether this
unnatural perfection be real.

Eastward then to Montana I took my way for the Yellowstone National
Park, called in the guide-books "Wonderland." But the real Wonderland
began in the train. We were a merry crew. One gentleman announced his
intention of paying no fare and grappled the conductor, who neatly
cross-buttocked him through a double plate-glass window. His head was
cut open in four or five places. A doctor on the train hastily stitched
up the biggest gash, and he was dropped at a wayside station, spurting
blood at every hair--a scarlet-headed and ghastly sight. The conductor
guessed that he would die, and volunteered the informa