Whenever I look back over the pleasurable experiences which belong to the years I have spent in the Northland I find my thoughts dwelling upon my first summer in St. Michael. Here the summer comes almost in a day, and following upon the heels of a rigorous winter so closely, the contrast is little short of startling. Knowing naught of this sudden transformation, I was not prepared for it. But I well recall a day in June when I looked out from my door-way and wondered whether there could be another spot on earth so beautiful. Gone instantly was every memory of the dark, bleak months that had just passed. The snow still lingered on the distant mountain tops, it is true. Great masses of pure white clouds rolled upon the intensely blue sky. The vegetation was in all its vivid freshness, the tundra carpeted with flowers. Even the reeking Arctic moss itself had burst into myriad brilliant flowers. It was the season of perpetual day,--twenty-four long hours of continuous sunshine. Nature seemed to be rejoicing in her own beauty and all the green things of the earth praised God! I can not resist the temptation to devote a small space to the flowers and birds of Alaska. Even I who lived a good many years in our own golden west, where flowers are by no means a scarcity, or a rarity, always feel a tendency to enthuse and become expansive when I think of the beauteous wild flowers of the Northland. They lift their dainty heads out of the tundra and seem to smile radiantly at you as you pass. I confess that when I saw the tundra first it did not make any particular hit with me! And this feeling is shared by many when first they come. I recall one of our Alaskan poets who must have shared it, for I find among his effusions a couplet to this effect: "Sometimes it's as soggy as sawdust! Sometimes it's as soft as a sponge!" Like many others I had gone to Alaska with a mental picture of a great, snow-covered expanse which stretched away for illimitable miles in loneliness and silence. But one day as I walked along I suddenly saw--a little yellow flower. I began to wonder whether wild flowers grew here. A little investigation brought astonishing results.