e place, that caught our eye before the youngster
caught our ears with his cheerful greeting. "Oh, I so glad!" said he,
with a mist in his eye that harmonized with everything else. "I make
eighty dollar in four month at Wrangell. My sister not know me when I
get home. I so glad to come back to Sitka. I not go away any more."

Of course we poured out of the ship in short order, and spread through
the town like ants. At the top of the dock is the Northwest Trading
Company's store--how we learned to know these establishments! Some
scoured it for a first choice, and got the pick of the wares; but here,
as elsewhere, we found the same motley collection of semi-barbarous
bric-a-brac--brilliantly painted Indian paddles spread like a sunburst
against the farther wall; heaps of wooden masks and all the fantastical
carvings such as the aborigines delight in, and in which they almost
excel. Up the main street of the town is another store, where a series
of large rooms, crowded with curios bewilders the purchaser of those
grotesque wares.

At the top of Katalan's rock, on the edge of the sea, stands the
Colonial Castle. It is a wooden structure, looking more like a barrack
than a castle. At the foot of the rock are the barracks and Custom
House. A thin sprinkling of marines, a few foreign-looking citizens--the
full-fledged Rusk of the unmistakable type is hard to find
nowadays,--and troops of Indians give a semblance of life to this
quarter. At the head of the street stands the Russian Orthodox Church;
and this edifice, with its quaint tower and spire, is really the lion of
the place. St. Michael's was dedicated in 1844 by the Venerable Ivan
Venianimoff, the metropolitan of Moscow, for years priest and Bishop at
Ounalaska and Sitka.

In his time the little chapel was richly decorated; but as the
settlement began falling to decay, the splendid vestments and sacred
vessels and altar ornaments, and even the Bishop himself, were
transferred to San Francisco. It then became the duty of the Bishop to
visit annually the churches at Sitka, Ounalaska and Kodiak, as the
Russian Government still allowed these dependencies an annuity of
$50,000. But the last incumbent of the office, Bishop Nestor, was lost
tragically at sea in May, 1883; and, as the Russian priesthood seems to
be less pious than particular, the office is still a-begging--unless I
have been misinformed. Probably the mission will be abandoned. Certainly
the dilapidated chapel