Seattle, Washington, August 19: After spending a few hours in Livingston, which has a sightly location, at the mouth of a canyon and in sight of a mountain on which the snow lies for ten months in the year, we proceeded westward. From Montana we passed into Idaho, where the tree butchers are cutting up the last remnants of the white pine. It is, for the most part, a dreary country, where the timber has been cut over and where forest fires have left masses of charred stumpage. Waste everywhere and nothing but waste! The American lumberman in the past has picked out the best and left the rest to the desolation that follows the man with the axe and the torch. It has been the working out of the practical American idea of getting the most money with the least care about the future. It is pity and disgust and indignation that one feels. But such are the ravages of commerce in a commercial era among a commercial people. The next day we reached Spokane, on the other side of the Rockies, mistress of a vast industrial area, reaching up into the mountains on one side, with their mines and their lumber, and stretching out over the Washington wheat fields, on the other. A great city, the creation of a few years, but to the casual traveler, more or less uninteresting, broiling and sizzling in the August sun, treeless, for the most part, and to that extent cheerless. But the volume of business transacted is large and the business buildings are fine and the people, grown richer, are building new houses and surrounding themselves with the luxuries which American people everywhere seek after and prize.