AN ARCADIAN TOWN 8 1 



stepped from April into June, with the mercury near the 

 seventies, and our spirits rose accordingly. How we 

 swarmed out of the ship, like boys out of school, longing 

 for a taste of grass and of the rural seclusion and sweet- 

 ness ! That great green orb or half orb of a mountain 

 that shone down upon us from just back of the town, 

 the highest point in its rim at an altitude of 2,300 feet — 

 how our legs tingled to climb it! and the green vale 

 below, where the birds were singing and many rare 

 wild flowers blooming; and the broad, gentle height to 

 the north, threaded by a grassy lane, where groves of 

 low fragrant spruces promised a taste of the blended 

 sylvan and pastoral; or the smooth rounded island op- 

 posite over which the sea threw blue glances; or the 

 curving line of water sweeping away to the south to- 

 ward a rugged mountain wall, streaked with snow; or 

 the peaceful, quaint old village itself, strung upon paths 

 and grassy lanes, with its chickens and geese and children, 

 and two or three cows cropping the grass or ruminating 

 by the wayside — surely here was a tempting field to ship- 

 bound voyagers from the chilly and savage north. The 

 town itself had a population of seven or eight hundred 

 people, Indians, half breeds, and Russians with a sprink- 

 ling of Americans, living in comfortable frame cottages, 

 generally with a bit of garden attached. The people fish, 

 hunt the sea-otter, and work for the Alaska Commercial 

 Company. We met here an old Vermonter, a refined, 

 scholarly looking man, with a patriarchal beard, who had 

 married a native woman and had a family of young chil- 

 dren growing up around him. He liked the climate bet- 

 ter than that of New England. The winters were not 

 very cold, never below zero, and the summers were not 

 hot, rarely up to 8o°. There were no horses or wheeled 

 vehicles in town, and the streets were grassy lanes. Such 

 a rural Arcadian air I had never before seen pervading a 



