that the coast-line of Alaska is about twenty-six thousand miles
long, more than twice as long as all the rest of the United States.
The islands of the Alexander Archipelago, with the straits, channels,
canals, sounds, passages, and fiords, form an intricate web of land
and water embroidery sixty or seventy miles wide, fringing the lofty
icy chain of coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook Inlet; and,
with infinite variety, the general pattern is harmonious throughout
its whole extent of nearly a thousand miles. Here you glide into a
narrow channel hemmed in by mountain walls, forested down to the
water's edge, where there is no distant view, and your attention is
concentrated on the objects close about you--the crowded spires of
the spruces and hemlocks rising higher and higher on the steep green
slopes; stripes of paler green where winter avalanches have cleared
away the trees, allowing grasses and willows to spring up; zigzags
of cascades appearing and disappearing among the bushes and trees;
short, steep glens with brawling streams hidden beneath alder and
dogwood, seen only where they emerge on the brown algae of the shore;
and retreating hollows, with lingering snow-banks marking the
fountains of ancient glaciers. The steamer is often so near the shore
that you may distinctly see the cones clustered on the tops of the
trees, and the ferns and bushes at their feet.

But new scenes are brought to view with magical rapidity. Rounding
some bossy cape, the eye is called away into far-reaching vistas,
bounded on either hand by headlands in charming array, one dipping
gracefully beyond another and growing fainter and more ethereal in
the distance. The tranquil channel stretching river-like between,
may be stirred here and there by the silvery plashing of upspringing
salmon, or by flocks of white gulls floating like water-lilies among
the sun spangles; while mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over