370 Fly-rods and Fly-tackle. 



ampler facilities for navigation than a heavy dew. As 

 is usual in this type of boat, the motive power, freight 

 conveniences, and crew, occupied the main deck ; while 

 the passengers and skipper harbored in a railway-car- 

 like structure upon the upper deck. We were to em- 

 bark at Golden, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and 

 ascend the river as far as we could find the dew suf- 

 ficiently heavy. 



From the day we left Yellowstone Park, all the way 

 west to Tacoma, by way of Portland, Oregon, up through 

 Puget Sound to Vancouver, east on the Canadian Pacific 

 Railway to Glacier, into the Selkirk Mountains, wild- 

 goat hunting, and again on the railway to Golden, four 

 hundred and eighty miles east from the Pacific coast 

 over all this vast tract of country hung a pall of 

 wood -smoke from forest -fires, gray and depressing. 

 The magnificent mountains which make the scenery of 

 this region " equalled by few and excelled by none " 

 were to us as though they were not, the smoke -fog 

 blotting out everything not close at hand. Though we 

 had seen it all before under other and more favorable 

 conditions, we were none the less in sympathy with the 

 dismal character of the visible landscape, for to a lover 

 of the woods in the woods, and such were we all, the 

 thought of a forest-fire is as the thought of the ravages 

 of small-pox on the face of a beautiful woman. 



We were discharged from the train at Golden in the 

 early evening, and as the smoke blotted the surround- 

 ing landscape from sight we saw only Golden, and saw 

 it with undistracted attention purely on its naked mer- 

 its. And such a Golden! A small, very respectable 

 little railway station, two two - story frame buildings, 

 half transient lodging-house conscience forbids to say 



