Up through timbered hillsides, from green fields, from the verdure of the western flanks of the Cascades, winds the great river. The banks become steeper, the mountains behind them more rugged. Fairy threads of silver, falling water, flutter down from cliffs. Grotesque rocks, mighty monuments erected by a titan fire god when the world was young, rise sheer from the river's edge. Cumbersome fish wheels revolve sedately where the silver-sided salmon run in the springtime. The railroads cling close to the stream, perforce tunneling where nature has provided no passageway, and the boat ploughs against the current which here and there is swift and swirling as the cascades are approached. Then through the locks you go, or by them if you travel by the steel highways, and quickly the scenes change, these new ones painted in a vastly different vein from those that have gone before. The lofty, steep-walled hills become more gentle, and their cloak of green timber merges into brown grass. The river rolls between banks of barrenness as we emerge on the western rim of the land of little rain, for the moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific are thwarted in their eastern progress by the mountain barrier, along whose summits they cluster weeping, in their baffled anger, upon the wet westerly slopes, while the dry sunny eastland mocks their dour grayness. Close beside the river is the harshest of all this rainless land; sand blows, the cliffs are bare and black, the hillsides bleak and brown. But ever so little away from the barren valley bottom are rich regions of orchards and green fields, and easterly, in the countries of Walla Walla, Palouse, and John Day, far-reaching fields of grain abound. Farming is upon a bonanza basis, and the bigness of it all is reminiscent of the Dakotas, were it not for the majestic mountain skylines, blessed visual reliefs lacking altogether in the continental mid-regions. The volume then, is bound misleadingly, and those who see naught but its unprepossessing exterior gain no inkling of its charming hidden chapters.