Under this system our numbers have grown to upward of a hundred, and now rarely a month passes without additions. Of course, a process of natural selection goes on all the time. Not every one who comes remains; but we have every reason to be satisfied with the representatives of the mother-country who are making Oregon their permanent home, and the same feeling is shared, as I am confident, by the original residents. Shall I try to describe what sort of people we live among here, a hundred miles from Portland, the chief city in the State? [Illustration: Corvallis, 1880.] What the notions of some of our party were you will understand when I mention that all I could say could not prevent the young men of the party from arming themselves, as for a campaign in the hostile Indian country, so that each man stepped ashore from the boat that brought us up the Willamette with a revolver in each pocket, and the hugest and most uncompromising knives that either London, New York, or San Francisco could furnish. [Sidenote: _OUR LANDING AT CORVALLIS._] As ill luck would have it, just as we arrived, the sheriff had returned to town with an escaped prisoner, and had been set upon by the brother, and a pistol had been actually presented at him. I should say in a whisper that the sheriff, worthy man, had proposed to return the assault in kind, but had failed to get his six-shooter out in time from the depths of a capacious pocket, where the deadly weapon lay in harmless neighborhood, with a long piece of string, a handful or so of seed-wheat, a large chunk of tobacco, a leather strap and buckle, and a big red pocket-handkerchief. So I fancy he had not much idea of shooting when he started out. But the incident was enough to give a blood-color to all our first letters home, and I dare say caused a good many shiverings and shudders at the thought of the wild men of the woods we had come to neighbor with. The worst of it was, that it was the only approach to a tragedy, and that we have had no adventures worth speaking of. "Story, God bless you! I have none to tell, sir." Still we did know ourselves to be in a new world when we stepped ashore from the large, white-painted, three-storied structure on the water that they called a stern-wheel river-boat, and in which we had spent two days coming up the great river from Portland. It was the 17th of May, just a month from leaving Liverpool, that we landed. The white houses of the little city of Corvallis were nestled cozily in the bright spring green of the alders and willows and oaks that fringed the river, and the morning sun flashed on the metal cupola of the court-house, and lighted up the deep-blue clear-cut mountains that rose on the right of us but a few miles off.