26 JOHN BURROUGHS 



audience room, capable of seating eight or nine hundred 

 people, was truly rich and beautiful. Mr. Duncan is 

 really the father of his people. He stands to them not 

 only for the gospel but for the civil law as well. He 

 supervises their business enterprises and composes their 

 family quarrels. 



The Alaska Indian is of quite a different race from the 

 Red man, as we know him. He is smaller in stature and 

 lighter in color and has none of that look as of rocks and 

 mountains, austere and relentless, that our Indians have. 

 He also takes more kindly to our ways and customs and 

 to our various manual industries. 



In reaching the land of the Indian we had reached the 

 land of the raven also — few crows, but many ravens. We 

 saw them upon the beach and around the wharf long be- 

 fore we landed. In the village they were everywhere — 

 on the roofs of the houses, and on the stumps and door- 

 yard fences. Six were perched upon one of the towers 

 of the church as I approached. Their calls and croakings 

 and jabberings were in the ear at all times. The raven is 

 a much more loquacious bird than the crow. His tongue 

 is seldom still. When he has no fellow to talk to he talks 

 to himself, and his soliloquy is often full of really musical 

 notes. In these Alaska settlements they appear to act as 

 scavengers, like the buzzards in the South. Other birds 

 that attracted my attention were the song sparrow, a nest 

 of which with young I found amid some bushes near one 

 of the houses, and the olive-backed thrush, which was 

 flitting about the streets and gardens. 



In the afternoon we are steaming over a vast irregular 

 shaped body of water — Clarence Straits. On one side 

 the sky and water meet in a long horizontal line. The 

 sun is shining brightly and the far off snow-capped moun- 

 tains roll up against the sky like thunder-heads. Nearer 



