fifteen hundred feet in height, and thence decreasing to the Dalles, where the escarpments, washed by the river, are low trap bluffs on a level with the steamer's walking-beam, and the mountains have retired, bare and brown, like those of the great continental basin farther south, toward Mount Hood in that direction, and Mount Adams on the north. If the Palisades were quintupled in height, domed instead of level on their upper surfaces, extended up the whole navigable course of the Hudson, and were thickly clad with evergreens wherever they were not absolutely precipitous, the Hudson would much more closely resemble the Columbia. I was reminded of another Eastern river, which I had never heard mentioned in the same company. As we ascended toward the cataract, the Columbia water assumed a green tint as deep and positive as that of the Niagara between the falls and Lake Ontario. Save that its surface was not so perturbed with eddies and marbled with foam, it resembled the Niagara perfectly. We boarded the "Hunt" in a dense fog, and went immediately to breakfast. With our last cup of coffee the fog cleared away and showed us a sunny vista up the river, bordered by the columnar and mural trap formations above mentioned, with an occasional bold promontory jutting out beyond the general face of the precipice, its shaggy fell of pines and firs all aflood with sunshine to the very crown. The finest of these promontories was called Cape Horn, the river bending around it to the northeast. The channel kept mid-stream with considerable uniformity,but now and then, as in the highland region of the Hudson, made a détour to avoid some bare, rocky isl and. Several of these islands were quite columnar, -being evidently the emerged capitals of basaltic prisms, like the other uplifts on the banks. A fine instance of this formation was the stately and perpendicular "Rooster Rock" on the Oregon side, but not far from Cape Horn. Still another was called "Lone Rock," and rose from the middle of the river. These came upon our view within the first hour after breakfast, in company with a slender, but graceful stream, which fell into the river over a sheer wall of basalt seven hundred feet in height. This little cascade reminded us of Po-ho-nó, or The Bridal Veil, near the lower entrance of the Great Yo-Semite. As the steamer rounded a point into each new stretch of silent, green, and sunny river, we sent a flock of geese or ducks hurrying cloudward or shoreward. Here, too, for the first time in a state of absolute Nature, I saw that royal bird, the swan, escorting his mate and cygnets on an airing or a luncheon-tour. It was a beautiful sight, though I must confess that his Majesty and all the royal family are improved by civilization. One of the great benefits of civilization is, that it restricts its subjects to doing what they can do best. Park-swans seldom fly,-and flying is something that swans should never attempt, unless they wish to be taken for geese. I felt actually désillusionné, when a princely cortége, which had been rippling their snowy necks in the sunshine, clumsily lifted themselves out of the water and slanted into the clouds, stretching those necks straight as a gun-barrel. Every line of grace seemed wire-drawn out of them in a moment. Song is as little their forte as flight, — barring the poetic license open to moribund members of their family, and I must confess, that, if this - privilege indicate approaching dissolution, the most intimate friends of the specimens we heard have no cause for apprehension. An Adirondack loon fortifying his utterance by a cracked fish-horn is the nearest approach to a healthy swan-song. On the whole, the wild swan cannot afford to "pause in his cloud" for all the encomiums of Mr. Tennyson, and had better come down immediately to the dreamy water-level, where he floats dream within dream, like a stable vapor in a tangible sky. Anywhere else he seems a court-beauty wandering into metaphysics. Alternating with these swimmers came occasional flocks of shag, a bird belonging to the cormorant tribe, and here and there a gull, though these last grew rarer as we increased our distance from the sea. I was surprised to notice a fine seal playing in the channel, twenty miles above Fort Vancouver, but learned that it was not unusual for these animals to ascend nearly to the cataract. Both the whites and Indians scattered along the river banks kill them for their skin and blubber, going out in boats for the purpose. My informant's boat had on one occasion taken an old seal nursing her calf. When the dam was towed to shore, the young one followed her, occasionally putting its fore-flippers on the gunwale to rest, like a Newfoundland dog, and behaving with such innocent familiarity that malice was disarmed. It came ashore with the boat's-crew and the body of its parent; no one had the heart to drive it away; so it stayed and was a pet of the camp from that time forward. After a while the party moved its position a distance of several miles while Jack was away in the river on a fishing excursion, but there was no eluding him. The morning after the shift he came wagging into camp, a faithful and much overjoyed, but exceedingly battered and used-up seal. He had evidently sought his friends by rock and flood the entire night preceding. Occasionally the lonely river-stretches caught a sudden human interest in some gracefully modeled canoe gliding out with a crew of Chinook Indians from the shadow of a giant promontory, propelled by a square sail learned of the whites. Knowing the natural, ingrained laziness of Indians, one can imagine the delight with which they comprehended that substitute for the paddle. After all, this may perhaps be an ill-natured thing to say. Who does like to drudge when he can help it? Is not this very "Wilson G. Hunt" a triumph of human laziness, vindicating its claim to be the lord of matter by an ingenuity doing labor's utmost without sweat? After all, nobody but a fool drudges for other reason than that he may presently stop drudging. At short intervals along the narrow strip of shore under the more gradual steeps, on the lower ledges of the basaltic precipices, and on little rock-islands in the river, appeared rude-looking stacks and scaf foldings where the Indians had packed their salmon. They left it in the open air without guard, as fearless of robbers as if the fish did not constitute their almost entire subsistence for the winter. And within their own tribes they have justification for this fearlessness. Their standard of honor is in most respects curiously adjustable,—but here virtue is defended by the necessities of life. In the immediate vicinity of the cured article (I say "cured," though the process is a mere drying without smoke or salt) may be seen the apparatus contrived for getting it in the fresh state. This is the scaffolding from which the salmon are caught. It is a horizontal platform shaped like a capital A, erected upon a similarly framed, but perpendicular set of braces, with a projection of several feet over the river brink at a place where the water runs rapidly close in-shore. If practicable, the constructor modifies his current artificially, banking it inward with large stones, so as to form a sort of sluice in which passing fish will be more completely at his mercy. At the season of their periodic ascent, salmon swarm in all the rivers of our Pacific coast; the Columbia and Willamette are alive with them for a long distance above the cascades of the one and the Oregon City Fall of the other. The fisherman stands, nearly or quite naked, at the edge of his scaffolding, armed with a net extended at the end of a long pole, and so ingeniously contrived that the weight of the salmon and a little dexterous management draw its mouth shut on the captive like a purse as soon as he has entered. A helper stands behind the fisherman to assist in raising the haul, -to give the fish a tap on the nose, which kills him instantly, - and finally to carry him ashore to be split and dried, without any danger of his throwing himself back into the water from the hands of his captors, as might easily happen by omitting the coup- de- grace. Another method of catching salmon, much in vogue among the Sacramento and Pitt River tribes, but apparently less employed by the Indians of the Columbia, is harpooning with a very clever instrument constructed after this wise. A hard wood shaft is neatly, but not tightly, fitted into the socket of a sharp-barbed spearhead carved from bone. Through a hole drilled in |