He who has never seen the winter night in Alaska has missed one of the most beautiful sights in the whole world. In many other corners of this earth I have watched the coming of the night but nowhere else has it ever moved me so deeply. Here, as nowhere else, "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork!" How many times have I sat in my door-way and watched the ending of the day. If there have been a few flying clouds during the afternoon they seldom fail to clear at evening. One by one the stars come out. From some remote darkness long meteors slip silently and shoot across the heavens, leaving phosphorescent trails, their scattered star dust, behind them. The features of the distant mountains, so lovable by day, become grim, hard, forbidding, when at nightfall they gather their gray hoods about their heads and go to sleep, standing! Ah, the wild, weird beauty of an unpeopled land! The old Italian adage "See Naples and die!" never fails to spring to my mind whenever I look out upon the dark, crisp, bespangled night sky in Alaska. Over all its other brilliancy the vivid tones of the Aurora, flashes of green and red, shoot riotously. The Northern Lights! Only in Alaska does one see them in all their gorgeous glory! If sentiment be a part of man's make-up (and where is he who can deny it?), the lover of the _Land of Tomorrow_ will not even attempt to stifle in his heart a wish that is almost a prayer. It is that when the hour shall come for him to venture forth into that undiscovered country whence no traveler returns, the Northern Lights may light him on his way! CHAPTER V GREAT OPPORTUNITIES If the idea that Alaska is the "land of ice and snow" is gradually disappearing another idea just as erroneous seems likely to take its place. This is that Alaska is the "land of gold." While it is true that along her streams and in the heart of her mountains lie minerals of the value of which no man can speak truly, the gold mines of Alaska are by no means her greatest asset. Her farms and fisheries, her enormous coal fields, the thousand and one opportunities to make money which do not exist in older localities are here to be had with small effort and little or no capital. I could cite many instances of those who have acquired wealth in this country from almost infinitesimal beginnings. A wealthy man of my acquaintance who now owns a four story building covering a whole block in Seattle went to Nome when the great rush was on. Unlike the others he neither sought for gold nor located mines. All he possessed was a boat. He established a ferry on Snake River, which is only about fifty or sixty feet wide. He charged twenty-five cents a trip. As soon as he got together a little sum he bought a steamboat which had been wrecked on the river and converted it into a lodging house. Two years later he was president of a bank!