We are now getting far enough north to make the sight of snow a familiar one, and the dense timber is striped with perpendicular windrows, where large avalanches have cut their way through them in the winter, when the snow falls heavily in these parts. Chatham Sound is the last channel we essay in British domain, and a royal old sheet of water it is, with a width of nearly ten miles, and about three or four times as long. After about three hours on its bosom a great channel is opened east and west before us, on which the swells from the broad Pacific enter. This is Dixon Entrance, and the boundary between British Columbia and Alaska beyond, whose blue mountains we see in the distance. The islands still continue; and the number, in this part of Alaska alone, has been estimated at eleven hundred, and this, too, excludes the rocks and islets. Clarence Strait is the main channel as soon as Alaskan waters are entered; but there are others on both sides of it which may be taken. It is a little over a hundred miles long, and somewhat variable in its width. It was named by Vancouver, nearly a hundred years ago, after the Duke of Clarence. From Clarence Strait we enter Stickeen Strait; for most of the steamers call at Wrangell, and this bends us off of our course. Wrangell is a tumble-down, dilapidated-looking town, in a most beautifully picturesque situation, and the first impression is to make one ashamed of the displays of the human race compared with those of nature. It is the port to the Cassiar mines; or, better speaking, it was, for they have seen their palmiest days, a fact which is quite evident on looking at their dependency, the town of Wrangell. The Cassiar mines are in British Columbia, and to reach them the Stickeen river, emptying near Wrangell, must be ascended, itself a most picturesque stream, and one well worth visiting if the tourist can catch one of the little boats that yet occasionally depart from Wrangell to ascend the rushing, impetuous river. Says one writer of it, in the Philadelphia _Dispatch_: "The Stickeen is navigable for small steamers to Glenora, one hundred and fifty miles, flowing first in a general westerly direction, through grassy, undulating plains, darkened here and there with patches of evergreens; then, curving southward, and receiving numerous tributaries from the north, it enters the Coast Range, and sweeps across it to the sea through a Yosemite valley more than a hundred miles long, and one to three miles wide at the bottom, and from five thousand to eight thousand feet deep, marvelously beautiful and inspiring from end to end. To the appreciative tourist, sailing up the river through the midst of it all, the canon, for a distance of one hundred and ten miles, is a gallery of sublime pictures,--an unbroken series of majestic mountains, glaciers, falls, cascades, forests, groves, flowery garden spots, grassy meadows in endless variety of form