In this rough, rocky region, Nature has been prodigal of both land and water,--making the former high and picturesque, and the latter deep and navigable, and running in all directions through the other, apparently for the purpose that it might be easily viewed. From the northwest corner of Washington Territory, through all of the coast line of British Columbia, and along Alaska's shores to the long-cast shadows of Mount St. Elias, stretches for nearly two thousand miles a picturesque panorama that seems as if the Yellowstone, the Yosemite, Colorado, and Switzerland and the Alps, were passing in review before the spectator; and, when the greatest northing is gained, Greenland and Norway have added their glacier-crowned and iceberg-bearing vistas to the view. It looks as if the Yellowstone National Park had sunk into the sea until the valleys were waterways, and the feet of the high mountains had been converted into shores. A grand salt-water river it is that stretches from Puget Sound, itself a beautiful sheet of water, to our distant colony of Alaska, a good round thousand miles, and whose waters are as quiet as an Alpine lake, even though a fierce gale rage on the broad Pacific outside. Beyond the parallel of Sitka, though the grand scenery may be no more imposing than that through which the tourist will have passed in coming from Washington Territory, he will find some of the curiosities of nature which are to be found only in the dreaded frigid zones,--icebergs and glaciers. Before the waters of Northwestern Washington Territory are out of sight, great patches of snow are to be seen on the highest of the grand mountains bordering the inland passage. These little white blotches in the northern gullies become larger and larger as the excursion steamer wends her way northward, until the loftiest peaks are crowned with snow. Then, across connecting ridges, they join their white mantles; and, in a few more miles, the blue ice of glaciers peeps from out the lower edges of the deep snow. Lower and lower they descend as the steamer crawls northward, until the upper parts of the passage are essayed, when they have come to the ocean's level, and, plunging into the sea, snap off at intervals, and float away as icebergs, some of them higher than the masts of the large, commodious steamers that bear tourists to this fairy-land of the frigid zones, if one can be allowed such an expression. Glacier Bay, which the excursion steamers visit on their summer trips, has a great number of these frozen rivers of ice debouching into it; and its clear, quiet waters, reflecting the Alpine scenery of its shores, are ruffled only by the breaking of the icebergs from the terminal fronts of the glacier, that send waves across its whole breadth, and with a noise like the firing of a sea-coast cannon. Muir Glacier is the greatest of this grand group, and surpasses anything nearer than the polar zones themselves. There is no use in going into