they bury themselves in it, and send up fresh sustenance to the trunk and limbs, which until then have been living a parasitic sort of life off the decayed moss. This is shown in illustration on page 19, being a view at Kaigan Village. Imagine a city boy tossing a walnut from a fourth story window, and its lodging on top of a telegraph pole, there sprouting next spring, and in the course of a couple of years extending its roots down the pole, insinuating themselves in the crevices and splitting it open, then piercing the pavement; the tree continuing to grow for years until the boy, as a man, can reach out from his window and pick walnuts every fall, and the idea seems incredible; and yet the equivalent occurs quite often in the south-eastern portions of our distant colony. Nor is all this marshy softness confined to the levels or to almost level slopes, as one would imagine from one's experience at home, but it extends up the steepest places, where the climbing would be hard enough without this added obstacle. In precipitous slopes where the foot tears out a great swath of moist moss, it may reveal underneath a slippery shingle or shale where nothing but a bird could find a footing in its present condition. There is wonderful preservative power in all these conditions, for nothing seems to rot in the ground, and the accumulated timber of ages, standing and fallen, stumps, limbs, and trunks, "criss-cross and tumble-tangled," as the children say, forms a bewildering mass which, covered and intertwined as it is with a compact entanglement of underbrush and moss, makes the ascent of the steep hillsides a formidable undertaking. A fallen trunk of a tree is only indicated by a ridge of moss, and should the traveler on this narrow path deviate a little too far to the right or left, he may sink up to his arm-pits in a soft mossy trap from which he can scramble as best he may, according to his activity in the craft of "backwoodsman-ship." Having once reached the tops of the lower hills--the higher ones are covered with snow and glacier ice the year round--a few small openings may be seen, which, if any thing, are more boggy and treacherous to the feet than the hillsides themselves, lagoon-like morasses, covered with pond lilies and aquatic plant life, being connected by a network of sluggish canals with three or four inches of amber colored water and as many feet of soft black oozy mud, with here and there a clump of willow brake or "pussy-tails" springing above the waste of sedge and flags. In these bayou openings a hunter may now and then run across a stray deer, bear, or mountain goat, but, in general, inland hunting in south-eastern Alaska is a complete failure, owing to the scarcity of game and the labor of hunting.