us, and we wondered what the temperature might be "down
south" in Dakota and New England.

In the grayest of gray days we came to Sitka, and very likely for this
reason found it a disappointment at first sight. Certainly it looked
dreary enough as we approached it--a little cluster of tumbledown houses
scattered along a bleak and rocky shore. We steamed slowly past it, made
a big turn in deep water, got a tolerable view of the city from one end
of it to the other, and then crept up to the one little dock, made fast,
and were all granted the freedom of the capital for a couple of days. It
is a gray place--gray with a greenish tinge in it--the kind of green
that looks perennial--a dark, dull evergreen.

There was some show of color among the costumes of the people on
shore--bright blankets and brighter calicoes,--but there was no
suspicion of gaiety or of a possible show of enthusiasm among the few
sedate individuals who came down to see us disembark. I began to wonder
if these solemn spectators that were grouped along the dock were ghosts
materialized for the occasion; if the place were literally dead--dead as
the ancient Russian cemetery on the hill, where the white crosses with
their double arms, the upper and shorter one aslant, shone through the
sad light of the waning day.

We had three little Russian maids on our passenger list, daughters of
Father Mitropolski, the Greek priest at Sitka. They were returning from
a convent school at Victoria, and were bubbling over with delight at the
prospective joys of a summer vacation at home. But no sooner had they
received the paternal embraces upon the deck than the virtue of
happiness went out of them; and they became sedate little Sitkans, whose
dignity belied the riotous spirit that had made them the life of the
ship on the way up.

We also brought home a little Russian chap who had been working down at
Fort Wrangell, and, having made a fortune--it was a fortune in his
eyes,--he was returning to stay in the land of his nativity. He was
quiet enough on shipboard--indeed, he had almost escaped observation
until we sighted Sitka; but then his heart could contain itself no
longer, and he made confidants of several of us to whom he had spoken
never a word until this moment. How glad he was to greet its solemn
shores, to him the dearest spot in all the earth! A few hours later we
met him. He was swinging on the gate at the homestead in the edge of the
town: a sweet, primitiv