IN GREEN ALASKA 



On far Siberia's barren shore, 

 On north Alaska's tundra floor ; 



At morn, at noon, in pallid night. 



We heard thy song and saw thy flight, 



While I, sighing, could but think 

 Of my boyhood's bobolink. 



On the higher peaks, amid lingering snow-banks, 

 Mr. Ridgway found the snow bunting and the tit- 

 lark nesting. Unalaska looked quite as interesting as 

 Kadiak, and I longed to spend some days there in 

 the privacy of its green solitudes, following its limpid 

 torrent streams, cHmbing its lofty peaks, and Hsten- 

 ing to the music of the longspur. I had seen much, 

 but had been intimate with Uttle ; now if I could 

 only have a few days of that kind of intimacy with 

 this new nature which the saunterer, the camper- 

 out, the stroller through fields in the summer twi- 

 light has, I should be more content; but in the after- 

 noon the ship was off into Bering Sea, headed for 

 the Seal Islands, and I was aboard her, but with 

 wistful and reverted eyes. 



The first hour or two out from Dutch Harbor we 

 sailed past high, rolling, green hills, cut squarely off 

 by the sea, presenting cliffs seven or eight hundred 

 feet high of soft, reddish, crumbling rock, a kind of 

 clay porphyry of volcanic origin, touched here and 

 there on the face with the tenderest green. It was as 

 if some green fluid had been poured upon the tops of 

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