The voyage up the Columbia for a hundred miles, and up the Willamette for twelve, to Portland, has many charms. First, the grand stream of the mighty Columbia, telling in its size and volume of the three thousand miles some of its waters have come from their far-off sources among distant mountains; then the banks, rising generally sheer from the water's edge, crowned with rich and varied vegetation, and here and there the rugged rocks breaking through, to give clearness and strength to outline; and then on either side the more distant hills, clothed with the dark fir-timber to their summits, and behind the mountains proper, with Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helen's showing their snowy heads. Here and there in a niche or angle under the bank lie huddled close the buildings of a cannery, the blue smoke rising from the central chimney, and the white boats tied to the piling which juts out into the deep water of the river. You are hardly conscious of leaving the Columbia for the Willamette. It looks as if it were an island in mid-stream behind and to the south of which you are about to pass; but soon you find that the supposed island is the opposite bank of the Willamette, and, passing beacons and marks, set to define the channel with the accuracy that is absolutely needed (since a sheer to the east or west of only a yard or two would leave you fast in a mud-bank for hours), you come in sight of Portland. I ought to have noticed that here and there along the banks coming up, almost on the river's level and exposed to inundation at each high water, you pass dairy-farms, consisting of a shanty, or tumble-down house, and a few acres of rank and muddy pasture, where ague seems to sit brooding on the branches of the trees, whose trunks and limbs yet bear the traces of last season's flood. But now for the juvenile but audacious Portland, who describes herself as "the commercial metropolis of the Northwest." One considerable suburb, called East Portland, stands on the east bank of the Willamette; but the main part of the town is on the west bank, and now nearly fills all the level land between the river and the hills behind, which seem to be pushing at and resenting the intrusion of the streets along their sides. Extensions are taking place along the northern end, where a considerable stretch of low-lying land is yet available along the banks of the river, and also to some extent at the farther or southern end of the city. The building westward is mounting the hill-sides, already dotted with the somewhat pretentious wooden houses of the more prosperous towns-people.