er, an old
Californian, who "wondered why Jim over there couldn't take her safe over
the bar."

"Do you think he knows the soundings well enough?" asked the anxious
skipper; and was answered,

"I don't know about that, captain; but he's been taking all sorts of
things 'straight' over the bar for about twenty years, to _my_ knowledge,
and I should think he might manage the brig."

The voyage from San Francisco is almost all the way in sight of land; and
as you skirt the mountainous coast of Oregon you see long stretches of
forest, miles of tall firs killed by forest fires, and rearing their bare
heads toward the sky like a vast assemblage of bean-poles--a barren view
which you owe to the noble red man, who, it is said, sets fire to these
great woods in order to produce for himself a good crop of blueberries.

When, some years ago, Walk-in-the-Water, or Red Cloud, or some other
Colorado chief, asserted in Washington the right of the Indian to hunt
buffalo, on the familiar ground that he _must_ live, a journalist given to
figures demolished the Indian position by demonstrating that a race which
insisted on living on buffalo meat required about sixteen thousand acres
of land per head for its subsistence, which is more than even we can
spare. One wonders, remembering these figures, how many millions of feet
of first-class lumber are sacrificed to provide an Indian rancheria in
Oregon with huckleberries.

On the second morning of your voyage you enter the Columbia River, and
stop, on the right bank, near the mouth, at a place famous in history and
romance, and fearfully disappointing to the actual view--Astoria. When
you have seen it, you will wish you had passed it by unseen. I do not
know precisely how it ought to have looked to have pleased my fancy, and
realized the dreams of my boyhood, when I read Bonneville's "Journal" and
Irving's "Astoria," and imagined Astoria to be the home of romance and of
picturesque trappers. Any thing less romantic than Astoria is to-day you
can scarcely imagine; and what is worse yet, your first view shows you
that the narrow, broken, irreclaimably rough strip of land never had space
for any thing picturesque or romantic.

Astoria, in truth, consists of a very narrow strip of hill-side, backed by
a hill so steep that they can shoot timber down it, and inclosed on every
side by dense forests, high, steep hills, and mud flats. It looks like
the rudest Western clearing you ever saw. Its br