eese. I felt actually _desillusionne_, when a
princely _cortege_, which had been rippling their snowy necks in the
sunshine, clumsily lifted themselves out of the water and slanted into
the clouds, stretching those necks straight as a gun-barrel. Every line
of grace seemed wire-drawn out of them in a moment. Song is as little
their forte as flight,--barring the poetic license open to moribund
members of their family,--and I must confess, that, if this privilege
indicate approaching dissolution, the most intimate friends of the
specimens we heard have no cause for apprehension. An Adirondack loon
fortifying his utterance by a cracked fish-horn is the nearest approach
to a healthy swan-song. On the whole, the wild swan cannot afford to
"pause in his cloud" for all the encomiums of Mr. Tennyson, and had
better come down immediately to the dreamy water-level where he floats
dream within dream, like a stable vapor in a tangible sky. Anywhere else
he seems a court-beauty wandering into metaphysics.

Alternating with these swimmers came occasional flocks of shag, a bird
belonging to the cormorant tribe, and here and there a gull, though
these last grew rarer as we increased our distance from the sea. I was
surprised to notice a fine seal playing in the channel, twenty miles
above Fort Vancouver, but learned that it was not unusual for these
animals to ascend nearly to the cataract. Both the whites and Indians
scattered along the river-banks kill them for their skin and
blubber,--going out in boats for the purpose. My informant's boat had on
one occasion taken an old seal nursing her calf. When the dam was towed
to shore, the young one followed her, occasionally putting its
fore-flippers on the gunwale to rest, like a Newfoundland dog, and
behaving with such innocent familiarity that malice was disarmed. It
came ashore with the boat's-crew and the body of its parent; no one had
the heart to drive it away; so it stayed and was a pet of the camp from
that time forward. After a while the party moved its position a
distance of several miles while Jack was away in the river on a
fishing-excursion, but there was no eluding him. The morning after the
shift he came wagging into camp, a faithful and much-overjoyed, but
exceedingly battered and used-up seal. He had evidently sought his
friends by rock and flood the entire night preceding.

Occasionally the lonely river-stretches caught a sudden human interest
in some gracefully modelled