It seems a pity, as, whether you hunt him among the mists and storms of an Alaskan autumn, or watch for him by a hill at the edge of some dark canyon, until even the bird _chiquetta_ stops her noisy little song, and the outlines of all objects become indistinct and moving, _Ursus horribilis_ is better worth hunting than any other beast, except perhaps the bighorn, in all America. P.S.--Since writing this, Sir George Lampson has kindly furnished me with the length of eleven American grizzly skins in his warehouse at one time--87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101 and 103 ins. respectively. On the day these particulars were furnished I myself put the tape over a grizzly skin in Sir George Lampson’s possession which measured 9 ft. from the eyes to the tail. III. BLACK BEAR (_Ursus americanus_) I have said so much incidentally about the black bear while writing of his congener the grizzly, that I have very little left to say of him in the proper place. A recent American authority describes this bear’s habitat as being confined nowadays ‘to some portions of the various ranges of mountains south of the St. Lawrence river, the Great Lakes, and (east of the Mississippi river) to parts of those portions of the Mississippi river and its tributaries which are yet unsettled,’ and to ‘the dense thickets of the Colorado, Trinity, and Brayos rivers.’ Colonel G. D. Alexander should have bethought him of those countries west of the Rockies (Alaska, British Columbia, Washington Territory, Vancouver Island, and Oregon) which are at present the principal stronghold of _Ursus americanus_; and as I am informed the chief source from which the fur-traders draw their supplies of black bear skins. Unfortunately for the black bear, the price of his hide has gone up lately in the fur market. Ten years ago $15 was a long price to pay for a bear’s skin; this year a trader out here paid as much as $35 for one. Whatever the ultimate result of this rise in value may be, the immediate consequence of it has been to show the world what a vast number of bears can be killed in America if they are wanted. Here are some statistics of recent crops of bear in America which speak for themselves. The Hudson Bay Company, of course, draws _all_ its supply of hides from this continent, and I am assured that the same maybe said (with scarcely any allowance for Russian, Norwegian, Indian, or other skins) of the great firm of C. M. Lampson & Co. These two firms collected in 1891 and offered for sale in 1892 no fewer than 29,081 bear hides, to which enormous total the Hudson Bay Company contributed 11,027 hides. Some idea of the proportion of black to other skins at these sales may be obtained by looking at the Hudson Bay Company’s lists for 1891, in which we find 11,414 black, 1,875 brown, 253 grey, and 130 white bear skins offered for sale. [Illustration: ‘When Spring in the woods’]