est young girl and carried her ashore like a doll; but the second officer, deceived by the hollow eyes of one tall woman, lifted her up gallantly, floundered for a while in the mud and the awful surprise of her weight, and then bearer and burden took a headlong plunge. The newly-married man carried his bride off on his back, and had that novel incident to put down in the voluminous journal of the honeymoon kept by the young couple.

We trailed along in files, like so many ants, across the sandy moraine, sinking in the soft "mountain. meal," stumbling over acres of smooth rocks and pebbles, and jumping shallow streams that wandered down from the melting ice. Patches of epilobium crimsoned the ground with rank blossoms near the base of the glacier, and at last we began ascending the dull, dirty, gray ice hills.

There was a wonderful stillness in the air, and the clear, sunny, blue sky brooded peacefully over the wonderful scene. The crunching of the footsteps on the rough ice could be heard a long way, and from every crevice came the rumble and roar of the streams under the ice. Rising five hundred feet or more by a gradual incline of half a mile, we were as far from seeing the source of the glacier as ever; and the vast snow-fields from which the streams of ice emerge were still hidden by the spurs of the mountain round which they poured. At that point there were some deep crevasses in the ice, and leaning over we looked down into the bottomless rifts. The young Catholic priest, forgetting everything in the ardor of the moment and the ice-fever, labored like a giant, hurling vast boulders into the depths, that we might hear the repeated

crashes as they struck from side to side, before the splash told that they had reached the subterranean river that roared so fiercely. In the outer sunshine the ice sparkled like broken bits of silver, but in the crevasses the colors were intensified from the palest ice-green to a deeper and deeper blue that was lost in shadowy purple at the last point. The travellers who had learned their glaciers in Switzerland sat amazed at the view before them, and owned that the glacier on which they were sitting was much larger and more broken than the Mer de Glace, while nothing in the Alps could equal the smaller glacier beyond, that lay glittering like a great jewel-house and dropping bergs of beryl and sapphire into the sea.

Where the two arms of the glacier united, the lines of converging ice-streams were marked by great trains of boulders and patches of dirt; and fragments of quartz and granite, and iron-stained rocks were souvenirs that the pilgrims carried off by the pocketful. We sat on rough boulders and looked down into the ice-ravines on every side, and sighed breathlessly in the ecstasy of joy. An earthly and material soul. roused the scorn of the young Catholic divine by sitting down in that exalted spot to eat to munch soda crackers from a brown-paper bundle—while the wreck of glaciers, the crash of icebergs, the grinding of ice-floes, and world-building were going on about him.

We ran down the glacier slopes hand in hand, in long lines that "snapped the whip" and went allhands-round on the more level places, or crept in cautious file along the narrow ridges between crevasses. We drank from icy rills that ran in channels of clear

green ice, and crossing the moraine, we waded through mud ankle deep and were carried to the boats. The receding tide had obliged the sailors to push the boats further and further off, and when one frail bark was about full there was a crash, an avalanche of ice went splashing into the sea from the smaller glacier up the bay, and a great wave curling from it washed the boat back and left it grounded. Men without rubber boots were then so well soaked and so plastered with glacier mud that they just stepped over the boat's side and helped the rubber-clad sailors. float it off. The lower deck and the engine-room were hanging full and strewn with muddy boots and drying clothes all day, and the stewards were heard to wonder "what great fun there was in getting all their clothes spoiled, that the passengers need take on so over a glacier."

When Vancouver went to the head of Taku Inlet in 1794 he found "frozen mountains" surrounding it on every side, and his boats were so endangered by the floating ice, that his men gladly hurried away from it. Prospectors have had their camps at the mouth of the river at the head of the basin, and have searched the bars and shores of Taku River for miles across the mountain wall. Their evidence and that of the fur traders, who give scant notice to such things, prove the Indian traditions, that the ice is receding rapidly, and that the ice mountain that now sets back with a great moraine before it, came down to the water's edge in their fathers' days.

That day on the Taku glacier will live forever as one of the rarest and most perfect enjoyment. The grandest objects in nature were before us, the prime

val forces that mould the face of the earth were at work, and it was all so far away and out of the everyday world that we might have been walking a new planet, fresh fallen from the Creator's hand. The lights and shadows on the hills, and the range of colors, were superb,- every tiny ice-cake in the water showing colors as rare and fleeting as the shades of an opal, while the gleaming ice-cliff, from which these jewels dropped, was aglow with all the prismatic lights and tinted in lines of deepest indigo in the great caverns and rifts of its front. The sunny, sparkling air was most exhilarating, and we sat on the afterdeck basking in the golden rays of the afternoon sun, and looked back regretfully as the glaciers receded and were lost to sight by a turn in the fiord.

CHAPTER VII.

JUNEAU, SILVER BOW BASIN, AND DOUGLASS ISLAND

MINES.

URNING north from the mouth of Taku Inlet,

TURNE

and running up Gastineaux Channel, we were between the steepest mountain walls that vegetation could cling to, and down all those verdant precipices poured foaming cascades from the snow-banks on the summits. This channel between the mainland shore and Douglass Island is less than a mile in width, and the mountains on the eastern shore rise to two thousand feet and more in their first uplift from the water's edge. The snowy summits of the ranges back of it reach twice that altitude, and are the same mountains that shelter the glaciers of the north shore of Taku Inlet.

All of this Taku region is rich in the indications of precious minerals, and prospectors have explored miles of the most rugged mountain country in their search for float and gravel. The presence of gold along the shores of Taku River was long known, but the Taku Indians, who guarded the mouth of the river and kept the monopoly of the fur trade with the interior Indians, were known to be hostile and kept prospectors aloof. Prof. Muir found signs of gold every stream in the territory, ground by and swept

in