ON a frosty morning of last July, before sunrise, I stood upon the belvedere of the delightful Cloud Cap Inn, which a public-spirited man of Portland has provided for visitors to the north side of Mount Hood; and from that superb viewpoint, six thousand feet above sea level, watched the day come up out of the delicate saffron east. Behind us lay Eliot Glacier, sloping to the summit of the kindling peak. Before us rose--an ocean! [Illustration: Mount St. Helens, seen from the Columbia at Vancouver, with railway bridge in foreground.] Never was a marine picture of greater stress. No watcher from the crags, none who go down to the sea in ships, ever beheld a scene more awful. Ceaselessly the mighty surges piled up against the ridge at our feet, as if to tear away the solid foundations of the mountain. Towers and castles of foam were built up, huge and white, against the sullen sky, only to hurl themselves into the gulf. Far to the north, dimly above this gray and heaving surface were seen the crests of three snow-mantled mountains, paler even than the undulating expanse from which they emerged. All between was a wild sea that rolled across sixty miles of space to assail those ghostly islands. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER View up the Columbia on north side, opposite Astoria. Noon rest of the night fishermen. Much of the fishing on the lower Columbia is done at night with gill-nets from small boats. The river is here six miles wide.] Yet the tossing breakers gave forth no roar. It was a spectral and pantomimic ocean. We "had sight of Proteus rising from the sea," but no Triton of the upper air blew his "wreathed horn." Cold and uncanny, all that seething ocean was silent as a windless lake under summer stars. It was a sea of clouds. [Illustration: Astoria in 1813, showing the trading post established by John Jacob Astor.] [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER Looking north from lower end of Eliot Glacier on Mount Hood, across the Cascade ranges and the Columbia River canyon, twenty-five miles away, to Mount Adams (right), Mount Rainier-Tacoma (center), and Mount St. Helens (left). These snow-peaks are respectively 60, 100, and 60 miles distant.]