Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III OFF FOR ALASKA " All aboard! " At ten o'clock we steamed out of the harbor of Seattle and headed toward Alaska, the land of icebergs, glaciers and gold fields. Seattle sat as serenely on her terraced slopes as Rome on her seven hills. The sun shone bright and clear on the snow-capped peaks of the Cascades. Mt. Tacoma stood out bold and clear against the sun-lit sky. We steamed at full speed down Admiralty Inlet. At noon we stop at Port Tovvnsend, the port of entry for Puget sound. One sees at all these coast towns many Japanese, some dressed in nobby bicycle costumes, leading their wheels about the wharves, others wearing neat business suits and sporting canes. The less fortunate almond-eyed people are here too, dressed in the garb of the laborer, but it is to the former, the padrone, that the American employer goes for contract labor. In any case the laborer pays his padrone a per cent, of his wages. It holds true the world over that " some must follow and some command, though all are made of clay," as Longfellow puts it. We are soon out on the ocean, where it is all sea and flood and long Pacific swell. All up and down the picturesque shores of Puget Sound live the Silash Indians, who to-day dress in American costumes and follow American pursuits. One sees them on the streets of the cities and towns. The Silash, like the ancient Greeks, peopled the unseen world with spirits. Good and evil genii lived in the forest; every spring had its Nereid and every tree its dryad. They believed the Milky Way to be the path to heaven; so believed the ancient Greeks. One beautiful day there gleamed and danced in the sunshine a copper canoe of wonderful design. Down the sound it came. When the stranger whom it carried had landed he announced that he had a...