FAR AND NEAR 



slipped some time for aught I know. It is treeless 

 except upon the east end, which faces toward the 

 great Alaskan forests, from which the tree infection 

 may have come. 



How beautiful and interesting the shores we 

 passed that day ! Smooth, rounded hills, as green 

 and tender to the eye as well-kept lawns, recaUing 

 the hills we saw in May upon Snake River ; natural 

 sheep ranges, such as one sees in the north of Eng- 

 land, but not a sign of life upon them. 



I warn my reader here, that henceforth I shall 

 babble continually of green fields. There was no 

 end to them. We had come from an arboreal wilder- 

 ness to a grassy wilderness, from a world of spruce 

 forests to a world of emerald heights and verdant 

 slopes. Look at the map of Alaska, and think of all 

 the peninsulas from Cook Inlet and all the adjacent 

 islands, and the long chain of the Aleutians sweep- 

 ing nearly across to Asia, as being covered with an 

 unbroken carpet of verdure, — it must needs be the 

 main feature in my descriptions. Never had I seen 

 such beauty of greenness, because never before had 

 I seen it from such a vantage-ground of blue sea. 



We had not been many hours out of Uyak that 

 afternoon when we began to see a few scattered 

 spruce- trees, then patches of forest in the valley bot- 

 toms. At one point we passed near a large natural 

 park. It looked as if a landscape gardener might have 

 been employed to grade and shape the ground, and 

 84 



