INTO BERING SEA 93 



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. 

 Unalaska, July 18, 1899. 



On the higher peaks, amid lingering snow banks, Mr. 

 Ridgway found the snow bunting and the titlark nesting. 

 Unalaska looked quite as interesting as Kadiak, and I 

 longed to spend some days here in the privacy of its 

 green solitudes, following its limpid torrent streams, 

 climbing its lofty peaks, and listening to the music of 

 the longspur. I had seen much but had been intimate 

 with little; now if I could only have a few days of that 

 kind of intimacy with this new nature, which the saun- 

 terer, the camper-out, the stroller through fields in the 

 summer twilight has, I should be more content; but in 

 the afternoon the ship was off into Bering Sea headed for 

 the Seal Islands, and I was aboard her, 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 vol- 

 canic 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 the hills and had run down and 

 dripped off the rock eaves and been caught upon every 

 shelf and projection. The color was deepest in all the 

 wrinkles and folds of the slopes and in the valley bottoms. 

 At one point we looked into a deep smooth valley or 

 trough opening upon the sea, its shore line a complete 

 half circle. Its bottom was nearly at the water level and 

 was as fresh and vivid as a lawn in spring. Some one 



