Travels in Alaska 



said, to the sunny brightness of the day, a complaint 

 seldom heard in this climate. They got good exercise, 

 however, jumping from boulder to boulder in the 

 brawling stream, running along slippery logs and 

 through the bushes that fringe the bank, casting here 

 and there into swirling pools at the foot of cascades, 

 imitating the tempting little skips and whirls of flies 

 so well known to fishing parsons, but perhaps still 

 better known to Indian boys. At the lake-basin the 

 Collector, after he had surveyed his hay-meadow, 

 went around it to the inlet of the lake with his brown 

 pair of attendants to try their luck, while I botanized 

 in the delightful flora which called to mind the cool 

 sphagnum and carex bogs of Wisconsin and Canada. 

 Here I found many of my old favorites the heath- 

 worts kalmia, pyrola, chiogenes, huckleberry, cran- 

 berry, etc. On the margin of the meadow darling 

 linnaea was in its glory; purple panicled grasses in 

 full flower reached over my head, and some of the 

 carices and ferns were almost as tall. Here, too, on 

 the edge of the woods I found the wild apple tree, the 

 first I had seen in Alaska. The Indians gather the 

 fruit, small and sour as it is, to flavor their fat salmon. 

 I never saw a richer bog and meadow growth any- 

 where. The principal forest-trees are hemlock, spruce, 

 and Nootka cypress, with a few pines (P. contorta) 

 on the margin of the meadow, some of them nearly a 

 hundred feet high, draped with gray usnea, the bark 

 also gray with scale lichens. 



We met all the berry-pickers at the lake, excepting 

 only a small girl and the camp-keeper. In their 



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