The fairest of fair Portland is seen from her show hilltop, Council Crest. The days are not all sunny, but when they are and neither "Oregon mist"--which is a local humor for downright rain--nor clouds obscure the outlook, the easterly skyline from Council Crest is a superbly pleasing introduction to the State. Over the mists of the lowlands you see Mount Hood, and to have seen Mount Hood, even from afar, is to have tasted the rarest visual delight of all the Northwest land. Shasta, to the south, was an imposing welcomer to the empire of surpassing views, but Hood outdoes Shasta and its snow-crowned neighbors of the old Oregon country as completely as the pinnacles of Switzerland overshadow their lesser companions of the Italian Alps. Hood, somehow, breathes the very spirit of the State it stands for; its charm is the essence of the beauty of its surroundings, its stateliness the keynote of the strength of the sturdy West. It is a white, chaste monument of hope, radiantly setting for its peoples roundabout a mark of high attainment. A city of destiny its friends call Portland, and a mountain of destiny surely is Hood--its destiny to diffuse something of the spirit of healthful happiness and fuller ideals for those, at least, who will take time from the busy rush of their multiplying prosperity. And here again, on Council Crest, I venture to turn back to 1860; venture at least again to quote from the literary heritage of Theodore Winthrop, who saw Oregon's mountains then and wrote of them and their influences these lines: Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. The Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss,--where every breath is a draught of vivid life,--these Oregon people, carrying to a new and grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American Idea, under whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still have some little indestructible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyrannical aspirations some little respect for others; carrying there a religion two centuries farther on than the crude and cruel Hebraism of the Puritans; carrying the civilization of history where it will not suffer by the example of Europe,--with such material, that Western society, when it crystallizes, will elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical to suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny.