THE INSIDE PASSAGE 



19 



eux about mines, or Grinnell and Dellenbaugh about In- 

 dians, it could hardly be worth our while to try to find out. 



We were in British waters on June 1st and set foot on 

 British soil at Victoria on the Island of Vancouver. Even 

 the climate is British — mist and a warm slow rain — with 

 dense verdure and thick green turf dotted with the Eng- 

 lish daisy. Indeed, nature here seems quite as English as 

 does the sober solidly-built town with its fine and impos- 

 ing Parliament building — all but the birds. I hear the 

 western highhole calling like ours at home; and the olive- 

 backed thrush, the yellow warbler, and the white-crowned 

 sparrow are 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 sev- 

 eral thousand miles, one thousand of which was through 

 probably the finest scenery of the kind in the world that 

 can be seen from the deck of 

 a ship — 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 Thousand Islands, 

 the Saguenay, or the Range- 

 ley 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 



VISTA OF INSIDE PASSAGE. 



