We must pass rapidly over the events of the voyage, filled though it was with experiences quite new to the Bradfords. At Victoria, the pleasant little capital of British Columbia, situated on the southern point of Vancouver Island, where the steamer remained half a day, Mr. Bradford procured two mining licenses which gave himself and David the right to locate claims in Canadian territory, cut timber, and take game and fish. These licenses cost ten dollars apiece, and no claim could be legally staked without one. Poor Roly, not having reached the required age of eighteen, could take neither license nor claim. This business completed, they wandered through the city, David securing a picture of the magnificent Parliament building then just finished. Two days later, after passing up the sheltered Gulf of Georgia and crossing the broad, blue expanse of Queen Charlotte's Sound, the steamer entered a narrow waterway between islands on the west and the mainland of British Columbia on the east. Here the scenery was of the most bold and rugged description, reminding the travellers of the Hudson where it breaks through the Catskills. On either side rose immense mountain masses, covered below to the water's edge with a virgin forest of spruce, cedar, and hemlock, while from the bleak, treeless summits the snow could sometimes be seen blowing into the air like smoke. "What a pity," exclaimed Mr. Bradford to David and Roly, as they stood upon the deck gazing about them in admiration, "that the grandeur and beauty of this coast are so little known! We've been travelling for hours through this paradise without seeing a hotel, or a cottage, or even a log-cabin, and yet I believe it will not be long before tourists will throng to this region. Now there," said he, pointing to a level plateau on the top of a forest-covered ridge which rose a hundred feet above the water,--"there is an ideal site for a hotel. It commands a view of the strait both north and south, and of the mountains in every direction. No doubt there is a lake in that hollow beyond it, and the waterfall yonder is its outlet. I should like to spend a summer right here." That evening they emerged into Dixon's Entrance, where the open Pacific tossed them about for several hours until they came again into the lee of islands. Morning found them at Saxman, a village of the extreme southern end of Alaska, where the "Farallon" stopped to take on a passenger. At Ketchikan, a few miles beyond, there was a good wharf and a considerable settlement, and here the Bradfords saw for the first time a raven, which the boys mistook for a crow. Here, too, they first beheld an Indian totem-pole,--a great tree-trunk carved into grotesque shapes of beast and bird, and strange caricatures of the human countenance, all of which doubtless had a significance relating to the tribe, family, and achievements of the deceased chieftain whose memory it perpetuated.