customed ear scarcely
recovers from the first shock of it; a memory of totem poles in stark
array, and of the high feast in the Indian villages, where the beauty
and chivalry of the forest gathered and squatted in wide circles
listening to some old-man-eloquent in the very ecstasy of expectoration;
the memory of a non-committing, uncommunicative race, whose religion is
a feeble polytheism--a kind of demonolatry; for, as good spirits do not
injure one, one's whole time is given to the propitiation of the evil.
This is called Shamanism, and is said to have been the religion of the
Tartar race before the introduction of Buddhism, and is still the creed
of the Siberians; a memory of solitary canoes on moonlit seas and of
spicy pine odors mingled with the tonic of moist kelp and salt-sea air.

A memory of friends who were altogether charming, of a festival without
a flaw. O my kind readers! when the Alaska Summer Hotel Company has
stocked the nooks and corners of the archipelago with caravansaries, and
good boats are filling them with guests who go to spend the season in
the far Northwest, fail not to see that you are numbered among the
elect; for Alaska outrivers all rivers and out-lakes all lakes--being
itself a lake of ten thousand islands; it out-mountains the Alps of
America, and certainly outdoes everything else everywhere else, in the
shape of a watering place. And when you have returned from there, after
two or three months' absence from the world and its weariness, you will
begin to find that your "tum-tum is white" for the first time since your
baptismal day, and that you have gained enough in strength and energy to
topple the totem pole of your enemy without shedding a feather. There
is hope for Alaska in the line of a summer resort.

As ghosts scent the morning air and are dispersed, so we scented the
air, which actually seemed more familiar as we approached Washington in
the great Northwest; and the spirit of peace, of ease and of lazy
contentment that had possessed our souls for three weeks took flight. It
was now but a day's sail to Victoria, and yet we began to think we would
never get there.

We were hungry for news of the world which we had well-nigh forgotten.
Three weeks! It seemed to us that in this little while cities might have
been destroyed, governments overthrown, new islands upheaved and old
ones swallowed out of sight. Then we were all expecting to find heaps of
letters from everybody awaiting u