CHAPTER XXVI. AN HISTORIC STEAMER. The following interesting account of the historic steamer _Beaver_, the first to round the Horn into the Pacific, will be read by native sons as well as pioneers with renewed interest, as it is many years since this account was published. The _Beaver_ lay off the old Customs House for a long time, until taken by the Admiralty for hydrographic work. When done with for that purpose she was sold for mercantile purposes again. For some years she was in charge of my old friend, Captain "Wully Mutchell," as he was called by his friends, and he had many, for he was as jolly as a sandboy and always joking, in fact more like a man of fifty instead of eighty, as he really was. [Illustration: The steamer Beaver.] "More than thirty-nine years have passed and a generation of men have come and gone since the Hudson's Bay Company's steamer _Beaver_, whose sale was chronicled yesterday, floated with the tide down the River Thames, through the British Channel, and went out into the open, trackless sea, rounded Cape Horn, clove the placid waters of the Pacific Ocean, and anchored at length, after a passage that lasted one hundred and sixty-three days, at Astoria on the Columbia River, then the chief 'town' on the Pacific Coast. Built and equipped at a period when the problem of steam marine navigation was yet to be solved, is it any wonder that the little steamer which was destined to traverse two oceans--one of them scarcely known outside of books of travel--was an object of deep and engrossing interest from the day that her keel was first laid until the morning when she passed out of sight amidst the encouraging cheers of thousands gathered on either shore, and the answering salvoes of her own guns, on a long voyage to an unknown sea?