ty valley of the great Fraser River.
The scenery between Calgary and Kamloops is indescribably majestic.
We were furnished by the railroad company with a time-table in the
form of a pamphlet, and a description of the principal railway
stations and surrounding country written by Lady Smith, the wife
of Sir Donald Smith, of Montreal, one of the original projectors
of the Canadian Pacific railroad. This lady was an artist, a poet,
with high literary attainment, and her descriptions of the mountains,
of the glaciers, of the rivers and scenery were exceedingly well
done. We stopped at one of the company hotels, at the foot of one
of the mightiest mountains, whose peak ascends thousands of feet
into the air, and at whose base, within a few rods of the entrance
to the hotel, was the greatest of the mighty glaciers, almost equal
in beauty and grandeur, as seen by us, with the far-famed glacier
of the Rhone.

The construction of this railroad through the mountains is a marvel
of engineering skill and well illustrates what the persistence and
industry of man can accomplish. More than seventy miles of this
line, as I remember it, are covered by snowsheds, constructed of
stanch timbers along the base of the mountain in such a manner that
the avalanches, which occasionally rush down from the mountain top
and from the side of the mountain, strike upon the sheds and so
fall harmless into the valley below, while the powerful locomotives
go rushing through the snowsheds, heedless of the dangers overhead.

The Fraser River was full of camps of men engaged in the business
of catching, drying and canning the salmon of that stream. The
timber along this river is of great importance. The Canadian fir
and other indigenous trees line the banks and mountain sides in a
quantity sufficient to supply the demand of the people of that
great country for many years to come. But it was unpleasant to
witness the devastation that the fires had made by which great
sections of the forests had been killed. The Canadian government
has made a determined effort to suppress these fires in their
forests and upon their plains, and it is one of the duties of the
mounted police force, which we saw everywhere along the line of
the road, to enforce the regulations in regard to the use of fire,
but, naturally and necessarily, nearly all these efforts are abortive
and great destruction results.

Vancouver, at the mouth of the Fraser, is the terminus of the