IN GREEN ALASKA 



ment building — all but the birds. I heard the west- 

 ern highhole calling hke ours at home; and the 

 russet-backed thrush, the yellow warbler, and the 

 white-crowned sparrow were in song along the woods 

 and brushy fields. 



On June 1st, after touching at Victoria, we were 

 fairly launched upon our voyage. Before us was a 

 cruise of several thousand miles, one thousand of 

 which was through probably the finest scenery of 

 the kind in the world that can be viewed from the 

 deck of a sliip — the scenery of fiords and mountain- 

 locked bays and arms of the sea. Day after day 

 a panorama unrolls before us with features that 

 might have been gathered from the Highlands of 

 the Hudson, from Lake George, from the Thou- 

 sand Islands, the Saguenay, and the Rangeley Lakes 

 in Maine, with the addition of towering snow- 

 capped peaks thrown in for a background. The 

 edge of this part of the continent for a thousand 

 miles has been broken into fragments, small and 

 great, as by the stroke of some earth-cracking 

 hammer, and into the openings and channels thus 

 formed the sea flows freely, often at a depth of from 

 one to two thousand feet. It is along these inland 

 ocean highways, through tortuous narrows, up 

 smooth, placid inlets, across broad island-studded 

 gulfs and bays, with now and then the mighty throb 

 of the Pacific felt for an hour or two through some 

 open door in the wall of islands, that our course lay* 



93 



