er of tourists,
are few and uninteresting. It has two monuments erected to the memory
of the distinguished navigators Bering and La Perouse, and there are
traces on its hills of the fortifications built during the Crimean War
to repel the attack of the allied French and English squadrons; but
aside from these, the town can boast of no objects or places of
historical interest. To us, however, who had been shut up nearly two
months in a close dark cabin, the village was attractive enough of
itself, and early on the following morning we went ashore for a ramble
on the wooded peninsula which separates the small harbour from Avacha
Bay. The sky was cloudless, but a dense fog drifted low over the
hilltops and veiled the surrounding mountains from sight. The whole
landscape was green as emerald and dripping with moisture, but the
sunshine struggled occasionally through the grey cloud of vapour, and
patches of light swept swiftly across the wet hillsides, like sunny
smiles upon a tearful face. The ground everywhere was covered with
flowers. Marsh violets, dotted the grass here and there with blue;
columbine swung its purple spurred corollas over the grey mossy rocks;
and wild roses appeared everywhere in dense thickets, with their
delicate pink petals strewn over the ground beneath them like a
coloured shadow.

Climbing up the slope of the steep hill between the harbour and the
bay, shaking down little showers of water from every bush, we touched,
and treading under foot hundreds of dewy flowers, we came suddenly
upon the monument of La Perouse. I hope his countrymen, the French,
have erected to his memory some more tasteful and enduring token of
their esteem than this. It is simply a wooden frame, covered with
sheet iron, and painted black. It bears no date or inscription
whatever, and looks more like the tombstone over the grave of a
criminal, than a monument to keep fresh the memory of a distinguished
navigator.

Bush sat down on a little grassy knoll to make a sketch of the scene,
while Mahood and I wandered on up the hill toward the old Russian
batteries. They are several in number, situated along the crest of
the ridge which divides the inner from the outer bay, and command the
approaches to the town from the west. They are now almost overgrown
with grass and flowers, and only the form of the embrasures
distinguishes them from shapeless mounds of earth. It would be thought
that the remote situation and inhospitable cli