mountain home imaginable.

It was the log house of the "Humes Boys," who seem as much of an
institution in the Olympics as the mountains themselves. Bred in the
Adirondacks the Humes migrated westward and hit upon this isolated
homestead in the corner of Washington, where a growing influx of hunters
and fishermen finds them out and they are kept busy during the summer
months as guides and packers to the many vacationists who know them and
their knowledge of the surrounding regions. In the winter they trap
and--I imagine from the evident tastes of Grant Humes--read good books
on out-of-door subjects, close to the glowing stove, while the winds
whistle up and down the valley and the snow piles high. Gardeners, too,
they are in a modest way, raising all their vegetables. And cooks! What
cooks! In years gone by some pioneer settler had planted plum trees, and
when we first saw Grant Humes no housewife was busier with jelly-making
than he.

"It's a bother now, and I don't suppose I enjoy it more than any other
man likes such work," said he. "But when we're here in January and
February, pretty well shut off from the world, and there's a great
sameness about the food, I tell you a hundred glasses of plum jelly look
almighty good--not to mention tasting!"

I can vouch for the taste of it in September; if the midwinter season
improves the flavor I'm in a most receptive mood for a Christmas
invitation to the cabin on the Elwha!

For those who have the right sort of taste, existence such as the
Humes's must seem quite Utopian. Their garden and their rifles,
supplemented by importations from the store "down below," feed them;
their meadows supply hay for their stock; fuel of course is everywhere,
and a little captivated stream brought to the house in a hand-hewed
flume supplies an icy approximation of "running water." Hemming in the
meadowland oasis are giant hills, their neighboring flanks hidden by
mighty timber, their summits gray and brown beneath mantles of brush and
berry, closing in the valley so resolutely that its hours of sunlight
are almost as meager as in the cavernous fjord lands of Norway.

After Humes's the trail wound through abysmal forest depths, skirting
fir and pine and cedar of unbelievable girth, or making irksome detours
where some fallen monarch blocked the way. Needles and ferns there were
underfoot, a drapery of moss overhead, and everywhere a penetrating
silence. The most _silent_ woods imaginable a