94 JOHN BURROUGHS 



suggested that it looked like a huge dry-dock, if dry-docks 

 are ever carpeted with grass. The effect was extremely 

 strange and beautiful. The clouds rested low across 

 the hills and formed a dense canopy over the vast verdant 

 cradle; under this canopy we looked along a soft green 

 vista for miles back into the hills where patches of snow 

 were visible. At another point a similar trough or 

 cradle had been carved down to within a hundred or 

 more feet of the sea, and upon its rocky face hung a 

 beautiful waterfall. Then followed other lesser valleys 

 that did not show the same glacial cross section; they 

 were V-shaped instead of U-shaped, each marked by a 

 waterfall into the sea. There were three of these in suc- 

 cession cutting the rocky sea front into pyramidal forms. 

 Often the talus at the foot of the cliffs was touched by the 

 same magic green. Then opened up larger valleys into 

 which we looked under a rolled up drop-curtain of cloud. 

 One of them was lighted up by the sun and we saw an 

 irregularly carved valley landscape, suggesting endless 

 possibilities of flocks and herds and rural houses. Here 

 again the green fluid seemed to have found its way down 

 the creases and runnels and was deepest there. Every- 

 where such a sweep of green skirts as these Alaska hills 

 and mountains present, often trailing to the sea! I never 

 tired of them, and if I dwell upon them unduly long, 

 let the reader remember that a thousand miles of this 

 kind of scenery, passing slowly before one on a suc- 

 cession of summer days, make an impression not easily 

 thrown off. 



THE SEAL ISLANDS. 



Before many hours we ran into lowering misty weather 

 in Bering Sea, and about 7 o'clock were off the Bogoslof 

 Islands, two abrupt volcanic mounds, one of them thrown 

 up in recent years, the other the breeding ground of in- 

 numerable sea-lions, yes, and of myriads of murres, a 



