full exhibition, and so easy of access that the most delicate woman could travel to, and view it, since an ocean-steamer can push to its very sea-walls, without a moment’s serious interruption, where from her decks may be scanned the singular spectacle of an icy river from three to eight miles wide, fifty miles long, and varying in depth from fifty to five hundred feet. Between the west side of this frozen bay and the water, all the ground, high and low, is covered by a mantle of ice from one thousand to three thousand feet thick! Here is an absolute realism of what once took place over the entire northern continent—a vivid picture of the actual process of degradation which the earth and its life were subjected to during that long glacial epoch which bound up in its iron embrace of death just about half of the globe.[10] This startling exhibition of a mighty glacier with its cold, multitudinous surroundings in Cross Sound, is alone well worth the time and cost of the voyage to behold it, and it alone. There is not room in this narrative for further dwelling upon that fascinating topic, for a full description of such a gelid outpouring would in itself constitute a volume. Throughout this archipelago of the Sitkan district, the strongest tidal currents prevail: they flow at places like mill-races, and again they scarcely interfere with the ship or canoe. The flood-tides usually run northward along the outer coasts, and eastward in Dixon’s Entrance; the weather, which is generally boisterous on the ocean side of the islands, and on which the swell of the Pacific never ceases to break with great fury, is very much subdued inside, and the best indication of these tidal currents is afforded by the streaming fronds of kelp that grow abundantly in all of these multitudinous fiörds, and which are anchored securely in all depths, from a few feet to that of seventy fathoms: when the tide is running through some of those narrow passages, especially at ebb, it forms, with the whip-like stems of sea-weed, a true rapid with much white water, boiling and seething in its wild rushing; these alternations between high and low water here are exceedingly variable—the spring-tides at some places are as great as eighteen feet of rise, and a few miles beyond, where the coast-expansion is great, it will not be more than three or four feet. Those baffling tides and the currents they create, together with gusty squalls of rain or sleet, and irregular winds, render the navigation of this inside passage wholly impracticable for sailing-vessels—they gladly seek the open ocean where they can haul and fill away to advantage even if it does blow “great guns;” the high mural walls of the Alexander fiörds on both sides, usually, of the channels, cause the wind to either blow up them, or down: it literally funnels through with terrific velocity when the “southeasters” prevail, and nothing, not even the steamer, braves the fury of such a storm.