"The ledge-ribbed hills on ev'ry side, To feasts of ore invite mankind, Nor Bering's waves may bar the way To golden courses milled and mined. "The fresh'ning breezes from the Pole Bear far the miners' joyous cry, As point of pick turns back the sod 'Neath which the glist'ning nuggets lie. "Here may the rover of the hills Find fickle Fortune's long sought stream, And revel in the boundless wealth That's ever been his life-long dream. "O, tundra, beach and lavish stream! O'er thee a world expectant stands; With Midas measure may'st thou fill The myriad eager, outstretched hands." Wonderful is our latest American Continental possession--the rich territory of Alaska. Limitless are its resources, unmatchable its possibilities. One of its admirers thus sounds its praises: "In scenery, Alaska dwarfs the world. Think of six hundred and seventeen thousand square miles of landscape. Put Pike's Peak on Mount Washington or Mount Mitchell and it would hardly even up with Mount Logan. All the glaciers of Switzerland and the Tyrol dwindle to pitiful summer ice-wagon chunks beside the vast ice empires of Glacier Bay or mighty Malaspina. Think of a mass of blue-green ice forty miles long by twenty-five miles wide, nearly the size of the whole State of Rhode Island, and five thousand feet thick, glittering resplendently in the weird, dazzling light of a midnight sun. Imagine cataracts by scores from one thousand to three thousand feet high; ocean channels thousands of feet deep, walled in by snow-capped mountains; sixty-one volcanoes, ten of them still belching fire and smoke; boiling springs eighteen miles in circumference, used by hundreds of Indians for all their cooking; schools of whales spouting like huge marine fire-engines and tumbling somersaults over each other like big lubberly boys, weighing one hundred to two hundred thousands of pounds each; rivers so jammed with fish that tens of thousands of them are crowded out of the water high up on the shore; and woods alive with elk, moose, deer, bear, and all sorts and conditions of costly fur-clad aristocrats of the fox, wolf, lynx and beaver breeds. Growing country, this of ours." PUGET SOUND TO SAN FRANCISCO.