along the bed-rock three hundred feet below the surface.
They have 'drifted' in here, and they are using hydraulic
mining, too. They seemed a jolly lot. They have a woman
cooking for their crew, and asked us to eat with them--the
best they had. We could not talk much in their language, and
they did not understand very much of ours.

"We walked down from the mountains, four and a half miles,
in an hour and five minutes, and were not tired.

"_Saturday, August 16th._--The Commissioner of Yukon
Territory--who is about the same as a governor would be in a
Territory of the United States--asked us to luncheon to-day,
because he knew of Uncle Dick. So we all went and had a very
pleasant time. This is the Government House, and it has the
British flag over it, of course. Everybody was very nice to
us, and other ladies and gentlemen asked us a lot of
questions, and we did of them, too. We felt very much at
home here, and friendly. The Governor, or Commissioner, used
to be American himself. He came up here in the early gold
days.

"One gentleman at the luncheon told a good many stories of
the old times. He told how cold it got sometimes. He said
once they made some candles out of condensed milk. They sold
them to a saloon-keeper, for a joke, because every one wants
candles in the winter-time, but the saloon-keeper could not
light these candles at all! He said there used to be a young
man in Dawson they called 'The Evaporated Kid' because he
was so thin. He said, too, there was a runaway express agent
who had absconded from somewhere in America, and when he got
to Dawson he hadn't anything except one painting, a copy of
a celebrated picture in Europe. He sold it for a
half-interest in a claim, which proved to be worth $60,000.
He went back to the States and gave himself up, and got a
month in jail after he had paid what he had stolen. Then he
came back to Alaska and has made a good citizen! He has
always kept the old man who sold the interest in this claim.
Of course they wouldn't tell us the name of this man.

"They say the best place for hunting big game is to go up
the Pelly River and then up the MacMillan River. White Horse
is a good place to start from. There are sheep up in there,
of two kinds, and moose and grizzly bear an