n and Kent,
centers of a rich dairy section; and at Renton, bristling with
manufacturing importance near the southern end of beautiful Lake
Washington. A dozen miles more and you are on the streets of Seattle,
metropolis of the northwest and third city in size west of the Rocky
Mountains.

Northward the course continues. A broad paved road winds along by Lake
Washington to Bothel, passing several pretty lakes, entering green
woods, intersecting meadows, crossing streamlets, rising to sightly
plateaus and descending again to peaceful valleys before it reaches
Everett, a city of 32,000, located on an eminence overlooking the waters
of the Sound.

The next town reached is Marysville, whence the highway skirts the
Tulalip Indian reservation, crosses the Stillaguamish river in the
Sylvan Flats and enters Stanwood where a scenic road branches off to
Camano Island. At Mount Vernon and Burlington, where it intersects the
Skagit county road leading from Anacortes eastward to the mountains, one
may appreciate the famous Skagit Valley, the "Holland of the Northwest,"
where 173 bushels of oats to the acre have been yielded on land
protected from the sea and river by immense dykes.

Within ten miles of Bellingham the Water Front Road is reached, said to
be the most picturesque on the entire route: for the Sound is plainly
seen from the shaded highway which clings to the side of Chuckanut
Mountain, while the electric interurban and the Great Northern railway
traverse the waterfront below. Bellingham, a city of 30,000, has
innumerable attractions to hold the tourist, who still has twenty miles'
journey if he would follow the Pacific Highway to the Washington limit
at Blaine, the most northwesterly municipality in the United States.
Near by is the Whatcom County Government Farm, the only one in the
northwest; where bulb growing rivals the same industry in Holland.

SUNSET HIGHWAY.

The Sunset Highway is the only route at present permitting through
automobile traffic across the Cascade mountains and connecting the
western with the eastern counties. Throughout its full four hundred
miles from Seattle to Spokane it introduces the tourist to scenes which
for diversity and pleasant surprises, varying from rugged mountains and
roaring waterfalls to peaceful irrigated valleys or broad wheat plains,
can nowhere be duplicated. With the exception of a few miles the grades
are never more than five per cent.

Branching off from the Pacif