Carter H. Harrison

“ Here in one was every shade of blue; all tints of green were resplendent in another; and then the sun would discolor these shades, and weave them into the sweet tones which paint an opal's cheek. Now an upper member of a newly broken recess under the sun rays sparkled as a million diamonds, and then another looked like a mass of crystalized olive tints. From out of a deep grotto at the base of the cliff flowed a strong river, which had been pent within its icy house, and now reaching the free air bounded and rushed to join the mighty sea. ”

“ Here in a wild basin of the mighty backbone of the continent, 2,300 miles from Montreal, nearly 1,000 from Winnipeg, and 600 from Vancouver, with no populous or productive lands contiguous, but surrounded by nature's boldest and roughest works, in which are the haunts of wild beasts—here one finds all the elegances and comforts of a city's suburbs; all of the delicacies and luxuries of a city hotel, coupled with the hygiene of a sanitarium, the ozone and bracing atmosphere of a lofty altitude, and the glorious scenery of a mountain fastness. ”

“ Mighty logs lie upon the ground so thickly that even a good woodsman can walk but little over a mile an hour. Cedar logs, moss-covered and sodden, stretch 100 feet in the tangled undergrowth, and have lain there so long that one often sees a fir tree, growing with its roots straddled over them 50 to 100 years old.
We were pleased to find among the guests of the springs one of Chicago's fairest daughters, now living at Tacoma, whose pulled-candy tresses three years ago out-glistened the fiber of her bridal veil, and whose eyes are bluer than the turquoise in her talismanic ring. ”

“ When satiated with his warm bath in this glorious pool, he can mount a great stalagmite on one side—a stalagmite resembling a huge mushroom—and a shower of cool water from a natural spring tumbles from above upon him, or he can stand waist deep in the warm embrace of the fluid while the cool sprays fall upon his head and shoulders.
If one prefers an outdoor swim he can splash in a sulphur spring forty feet across, of Nature's fashioning, while bubbling through sands at his feet water heated to 95 degrees rises and lures him to swimming depth. ”

“ What a little gem it is! A rounded patch of sea, a few hundred yards in diameter, lifted up and dropped thirty fathoms deep among well-wooded, sloping hills and connected by a short, deep channel less than a hundred feet wide, with the mighty ocean. This channel is in fact a gateway with smooth granite buttresses, of bowlder-like surface, lifting a few feet above high tide. These buttresses were built by no human hand, but were born of the molten mass poured up from the earth's fiery center. The very globe shook and reeled in volcanic spasms at their birth. ”

“ One can loiter lazily around the broad piazzas girdling the great hotel, and let vision lose itself among lofty, rocky, grotesque mountains, or sit in graceful Kiosk observatories overlooking a bold river tumbling near by in a furious cascade. One can watch the limpid, green waters of a large mountain stream meeting and unwillingly mingling with those of a milk-white, glacier-fed river, just below the vortex under the cascade. ”

“ The white man came; he who was fashioned in the image of his God; he who claims to be a follower of Him who taught charity to all things and gentleness of spirit—he came in his boasted civilization—born of families whose pedigrees run back a thousand years—and killed and slew in the mere love of killing—killed and slew simply because he could kill and slay. ”

“ As it falls it becomes a cart full, a house full, and then with a report as loud as that of a heavy cannon, a section of the wall's face separates from the mass behind and tumbles into the deep water with a splash which scatters spray one or two hundred feet around, and the air is filled as with the bellowing of thunder echoed from projecting ice walls and from the lofty mountains hemming in the narrow inlet. The fallen mass disappears below the surface. But look! See that monster lifting from the water a half hundred feet away from where the tumbling ice fell! ”

“ How like the fate of men! A shower or a cloud of dust sent a mighty one to pine on a bleak isle in a far-off sea, and made another moderate man the idol of a nation and its chosen Nestor. An invisible line with a name separated the birthplaces of two men, and this simple separation made one of them the leader of a lost cause but the idol of millions, and the other the victorious hero whom history may call the savior of a nation. ”

“ There the very earth has been burned and the Evil One seems to have set his foot-print on every rod. Men do live in them, but more blessed is he who dies in genial surroundings! What a hold upon us has the love of life! So short and such a bauble! How worthless when robbed, as it must be in this bleak tract, of every concomitant of the joyful! Only the All-powerful can reclaim the soil of the "bad lands," and not until a cataclysm has carried it 1,000 fathoms beneath the sea, will it be fitted for sunlight and ready to support life. ”

“ It is our own Columbia, which has been paying her Majesty's American land a short visit before it sweeps with majesty towards the Pacific. We cross this and enter upon a wealth of mountain scenery, which belittles what we have passed through, though we thought it so fine. High to the right lifts a monarch capped with snow. High to our left is a huge pair of twins, the double head of a monster.
Our iron horse pants along a rushing river cutting with foaming torrent through chasms so narrow that the father of our land could have leaped across them in the spring-tide of his manhood. ”

“ On either side tower mountains, say 3,000 feet high, rising from the water like great receding buttresses, clothed thickly in forest below, with scattered copses toward the upper slopes, and flecked with openings of low shrubbery in pale green, artistically contrasting with the dark tone of firs and spruce. All are topped by rocks, those near us gray, and the most distant ones of an undertone of purple, while in the far distance, the mountains on either shore become first blue-gray, and then blend off into sweet opalescent tints. ”

“ As it drops the emerald and the diamond struggle for supremacy, but the brighter crystal gains the ascendency before all is lost in the lace-like mist which envelopes the depths. The whole when seen from a little distance looks as light as a gem-decked veil of lace, but so vast is the body of the water which makes the leap, and so great the fall, that to one standing a mile away, with a point of land intervening between him and the fall, shutting off the noise of the splashing water, there comes a deep and mellow bass, richer than any I ever heard before made by a water fall. ”

“ The roads being tolerably good and entirely artificial, makes one expect to see hamlets, and he involuntarily finds himself looking for a farm house, when the coach emerges from a forest, and comes upon a broad stretch of clean looking well grassed native meadow land. A turn of a mountain spur along a crystal stream, which has deepened into a pool, suggests a mill pond, and that a water wheel will soon come into view. A grassy plain all sun-lighted causes one to look for a herd of cattle lazily lying in a wooded copse on its margin. ”

“ This line is jagged and toothed on its crest, with lofty glaciers glistening under the pinnacles. Sitting on the platform in front of the pretty station hotel just before sunset, watching the sunlight climb the rocky heights eastward, while those to the west were sinking into grayness, and then a little later as the daylight dodges into twilight and all becomes first a mellow gray, cold and repellent, except over the snow, which seems to emit a light all its own—sitting thus one sees a picture equaled in few spots of the world. ”

“ Oh, why am I not a man?" she exclaimed.
I leaned towards her, my heart spoke in tones she did not mistake. "Thank God! thank God! you are not."
She started, her eyes met mine, every drop of blood seemed to leave her cheek, she was so pale; our eyes looked into our eyes. Her face crimsoned, and she rushed out of the room.
Mrs. Allen apolegetically—"do not mind that child, Mr. Felden, she's an idiot," and then, her face became nearly malignant, "Yes, she's an idiot, a plague and a nuisance." ”

“ Niagara and the ocean are in eternal motion. Motion irresistably suggests change, and change precludes monotony. One does not lose his feeling of awe, after looking for many times upon the towering heights of the Yungfrau or of Kinchinjinga. Their inaccessible peaks and eternal snows repel every disposition to close communion. I doubt not, however, if a safe railroad could be run up to mighty Everest's loftiest pinnacle, that tourists would snap their fingers at the world's monarch when standing in warm furs 29,000 feet above the sea. ”

“ They look as if there had once been a vast upland plateau, which had been partly abraded and washed away, leaving lofty mountains more or less snow covered throughout the year, and many of them always clothed in mantles of white. The wear of countless eons of rains and frosts have made deep valleys and gorges and the beds of beautiful rivers, and rushing torrents, leaving the slopes of the mountains generally not too steep to afford footing for thick forests or for bands and copses of firs and pines. ”

“ Except when sailing across four entrances or broad straits running out to the open sea, the entire voyage to and from Alaska, usually is and always may be through straits, canals, and fiords so thoroughly protected from the ocean's angry waters that the smallest steamer can hardly feel a toss. On this excursion of ours, the briny depths below us were often as smooth as glass, reflecting the mountains, as from a mirror. ”

“ What a grand mind picture is presented to us, when we realize that glaciers once covered the northern half of this continent—glaciers whose sources were about Baffins Bay and within the Arctic circle, and whose feet stretched from the Alleghanies to the Rocky mountains—from Pennsylvania to Colorado! glaciers so vast that they built up moraines over a thousand feet deep! It is these thoughts which show us man's littleness and his vanity in boasting himself fashioned in God's image. ”

“ When we strolled in the deep shade of the dense forest behind Sitka, some of these impudent fellows settled in adjoining trees and held dialogues and debates, possibly upon our human characteristics. They would harange and then seem to crack coarse jokes, when one of them would almost laugh in low gutturals, not unlike the gurgling of water running from a two gallon jug. A wag among us declared they were making ward stump-speeches, and was willing to wager that if ravens language could be understood, we should find that some of the jokes were utterly unfit for polite ears. ”

“ Far up over us is Sir Donald piercing the sky; a sharp pointed three-faced rock lifting over 11,500 feet, under whose shadow we will halt at Glacier House, over 4,000 feet above the sea, while the pointed peak above us, all rock, stands about a mile and a half higher and so close that one would think a man on its pinnacle could almost throw a stone to the platform on which stands the pretty hotel.
We stop a day here. I spent three or four days there three years ago and would never pass it without a few hours' pause. ”

“ The enormous mass of forest, prevents many extended views, but those seen are very fine. Every break in the forests would reveal lofty mountains' slopes clothed in forests of marvelous richness, and now and then snowy heights would tower aloft. Once a fine view of Renier is caught, the monarch of the grand range. Robed in his snowy ermine he stands out a sceptered hermit wrapped in his isolation. Seen from the sound he is one of the most picturesque peaked mountains of the world, and from all inland points of view he is a grand towering mass of ever living snow and ice. ”

“ In our every-day life in modest places, we see the most trivial circumstances, mere straws, turning the fortunes of nearly all whom we have known intimately. It would probably amaze most people to find how small the thing was which sent them to high fortune, or led their feet into paths of mediocrity or on the road to adversity.
A run from nine to ten hours from Glacier, always through grand and majestic scenery and often among terrible and gloomy heights and gorges, brought us to Banff, near the western slope of the Rockies. ”

“ I wonder if those fellows up in yonder gallery ever pause to take in the grandeur of the scenery thrown about them. The mighty Giver of Good heaped up those piles of grandeur and beauty. The preachers intimate that the imp of darkness tempts us poor mortals with gold and silver. Believing as they do in the existence of a personal devil outside of man's nature, they should bow down and beg him to be good natured until their race be safe. They are powerless to hurt him. ”