noble, newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view as on the
trip through the Alexander Archipelago to Fort Wrangell and Sitka.
Gazing from the deck of the steamer, one is borne smoothly over calm
blue waters, through the midst of countless forest-clad islands. The
ordinary discomforts of a sea voyage are not felt, for nearly all the
whole long way is on inland waters that are about as waveless as
rivers and lakes. So numerous are the islands that they seem to have
been sown broadcast; long tapering vistas between the largest of them
open in every direction.

Day after day in the fine weather we enjoyed, we seemed to float in
true fairyland, each succeeding view seeming more and more beautiful,
the one we chanced to have before us the most surprisingly beautiful
of all. Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so
hopelessly beyond description. To sketch picturesque bits, definitely
bounded, is comparatively easy--a lake in the woods, a glacier
meadow, or a cascade in its dell; or even a grand master view of
mountains beheld from some commanding outlook after climbing from
height to height above the forests. These may be attempted, and more
or less telling pictures made of them; but in these coast landscapes
there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude
of features without apparent redundance, their lines graduating
delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is
so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all pen-work seems hopelessly
unavailing. Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past
forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure
headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very
paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed.

Some idea of the wealth of this scenery may be gained from the fact