Also, the captain will
point out to you in the distance that famous island of San Juan which
formed the subject or object, or both, of our celebrated boundary dispute
with great Britain, and you will wonder how small an object can nearly
make nations go to war, and for what a petty thing we set several kings
and great lords to studying geography and treaties and international law,
and boring themselves, and filling enterprising newspapers with dozens
of columns of dull history; and you will wonder the more at the stupid
pertinacity of these English in clinging to the little island of San Juan
when you reach Victoria, and see that we shall presently take that dull
little town too, not because we want it or need it, but to save it from
perishing of inanition.

It is something to have taste and a sense of the beautiful. Certainly the
English, who discovered the little landlocked harbor of Victoria and chose
it as the site of a town, displayed both. It is by natural advantages one
of the loveliest places I ever saw, and I wonder, remote as it is, that
it is not famous. The narrow harbor, which is not so big as one of the
big Liverpool docks, is surrounded on both sides by the prettiest little
miniature bays, rock-bound, with grassy knolls, and here and there shady
clumps of evergreens; a river opening out above the town into a kind of
lake, and spanned by pretty bridges, invites you to a boating excursion;
and the fresh green of the lawn-like expanses of grass which reach into
the bay from different directions, the rocky little promontories with
boats moored near them, the fine snow-covered mountains in the distance,
and the pleasantly winding roads leading in different directions into the
country, all make up a landscape whose soft and gay aspect I suppose is
the more delightful because one comes to it from the somewhat oppressive
grandeur of the fir forests in Washington Territory.

In the harbor of Victoria the most conspicuous object is the long range of
warehouses belonging to the Hudson Bay Company, with their little trading
steamers moored alongside. These vessels bear the signs of traffic with a
savage people in the high boarding nettings which guard them from stem to
stern, and which are in their more solid parts pierced for musketry. Here,
too, you see a queer little old steamboat, the first that ever vexed
the waters of the Pacific Ocean with its paddle-wheels. And as your own
steamer hauls up to the wharf, you