Everything is so open here, is so plain to see, that when you try to find some points of resemblance to that picture which has challenged your admiration in the Sitkan archipelago, you find nothing—absolutely nothing—in common effect. It is, nevertheless, just as attractive, just as grand; but how different! All is laid perfectly bare to inspection here—no dense forests and tangled thickets to conceal the surface of the diversified uplands and mountain slopes, or to hide the innermost recesses of the deep ravines and narrow valleys. While there is a vast variation in the islands, yet there is, to the mind of him who views them for the first time, the most helpless inability on his part to distinguish or even recognize them apart when he happens to revisit them. They are seldom ever clearly defined, being more or less obscured in fog and heavy rifts of cloud. The top of a headland peeps aloft, sharply outlined, while all below is lost in the mists and banks of fog that roll up there from the sea. Then, in remarkable contrast, only a few miles beyond, the rocks at sea-level and foothills of the next island will be entirely plain to your sight; while everything above is concealed, in turn, by a curtain of the same moist and vanishing misty fog. Fog, fog, fog everywhere, rising and descending with the force of wind-currents that bear it—now veiling, now revealing the startling and impressive beauties of this vast sea-girt chain of the Aleutian archipelago. These majestic blue swells of the great Pacific join with those cold green waves of that lesser, shallower ocean of the North in holding with firm embrace the most impressive range of fire-eaten mountains known to the geographer. This cordon of smoking, grumbling, quaking hills and peaks, when once surveyed, leaves an enduring image, grand and superb, on the retina of that eye which has been so fortunate as to behold it.