The beautiful and extraordinary features of preliminary travel up the British Columbia coast will have prepared the mind for a full enjoyment and comprehension of your first sight of Alaska. If you are alert, you will be on deck and on good terms with the officer in charge when the line is crossed on Dixon Sound, and the low wooded crowns of Zayas and Dundas Islands, now close at hand, are speedily left in the wake as the last landmarks of foreign soil. To the left, as the steamer enters the beautiful water of Clarence Straits, the abrupt, irregular, densely wooded shores of Prince of Wales Island rise as lofty walls of timber and of rock, mossy and sphagnous, shutting out completely a hasty glimpse of the great Pacific rollers afforded in the Sound; while on the right hand you turn to a delighted contemplation of those snowy crests of the towering coast range which, though thirty and fifty miles distant, seem to fairly be in reach, just over and back of the rugged tree-clad elevations of mountainous islands that rise abruptly from the sea-canal in every direction. Not a gentle slope to the water can be seen on either side of the vessel as you glide rapidly ahead; the passage is often so narrow that the wavelets from the steamer’s wheel break and echo back loudly on your ear from the various strips of ringing rocky shingle at the base of bluffy intersections. [Illustration: Lodges in a Vast Wilderness.] If, by happy decree of fate, fog-banks do not shut suddenly down upon your pleased vision, a rapid succession of islands and myriads of islets, all springing out boldly from the cold blue-green and whitish-gray waters which encircle their bases, will soon tend to confuse and utterly destroy all sense of locality; the steamer’s path seems to be in a circle, to lead right back to where she started from, into another equally mysterious labyrinthine opening: then the curious idiosyncrasy possesses you by which you seem to see in the scenery just ahead an exact resemblance to the bluffs, the summits and the cascades which you have just left behind. Your emphatic expression aloud of this belief will, most likely, arouse some fellow-passenger who is an old voyageur, and he will take a guiding oar: he will tell you that the numerous broad smooth tracks, cut through the densely wooded mountain slopes from the snow lines above abruptly down to the very sea below, are the paths of avalanches; that if you will only crane your neck enough so as to look right aloft to a certain precipice now almost hanging 3,000 feet high and over the deck of the steamer, there you will see a few small white specks feebly outlined against the grayish-red background of the rocks—these are mountain goats; he tells you that those stolid human beings who are squatting in a large dug-out canoe are “Siwashes,” halibut-fishing—and as these savages stupidly stare at the big “Boston” vessel swiftly passing, with uplifted paddles