BY CHARLES WARREN STODDARD Third Edition ST. LOUIS, MO., 1914 Published by B. HERDER 17 South Broadway FREIBURG (BADEN) Germany LONDON, W. C. 68 Great Russell Str. Copyright, 1899, by Joseph Gummersbach. —BECKTOLD— PRINTING AND BOOK MFG. CO. ST. LOUIS, MO. To KENNETH O'CONNOR, First-District-of-Columbia Volunteers, Gen'l Shafter's Fifth Army Corps, Santiago de Cuba: In Memory of Our Home-life In The Bungalow....

The Author returns thanks to the Editor of the Ave Maria for the privilege of republishing these notes of travel and adventure....

Commencement week at Notre Dame ended in a blaze of glory. Multitudes of guests who had been camping for a night or two in the recitation rooms—our temporary dormitories—gave themselves up to the boyish delights of school-life, and set numerous examples which the students were only too glad to follow. The boat race on the lake was a picture; the champion baseball match, a companion piece; but the highly decorated prize scholars, glittering with gold and silver medals, and badges of satin and bul

Colorado! What an open-air sound that word has! The music of the wind is in it, and a peculiarly free, rhythmical swing, suggestive of the swirling lariat. Colorado is not, as some conjecture, a corruption or revised edition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who was sent out by the Spanish Viceroy of Mexico in 1540 in search of the seven cities of Cibola: it is from the verb colorar —colored red, or ruddy—a name frequently given to rivers, rocks, and ravines in the lower country. Nor do we care

The trains run out of Denver like quick-silver,—this is the prettiest thing I can say of Denver. They trickle down into high, green valleys, under the shadow of snow-capped cliffs. There the grass is of the liveliest tint—a kind of salad-green. The air is sweet and fine; everything looks clean, well kept, well swept—perhaps the wind is the keeper and the sweeper. All along the way there is a very striking contrast of color in rock, meadows, and sky; the whole is as appetizing to the sight as a n

A long time ago—nearly a quarter of a century—California could boast a literary weekly capable of holding its own with any in the land. This was before San Francisco had begun to lose her unique and delightful individuality—now gone forever. Among the contributors to this once famous weekly were Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin Miller, Dan de Quille, Orpheus C. Kerr, C. H. Webb, "John Paul," Ada Clare, Ada Isaacs Menken, Ina Coolbrith, and hosts of others. Fitz Hugh Ludlow wrote

If you are bound for Alaska, you can make the round trip most conveniently and comfortably by taking the steamer at Portland, Oregon, and retaining your state-room until you land again in Portland, three weeks later. Or you can run north by rail as far as Tacoma; there board a fine little steamer and skim through the winding water-ways of Puget Sound (as lovely a sheet of water as ever the sun shone on), debark at Port Townsend, and here await the arrival of the Alaska steamer, which makes its e

We were waiting the arrival of the Alaska boat,—wandering aimlessly about the little town, looking off upon the quiet sea, now veiled in a dense smoke blown down from the vast forest fires that were sweeping the interior. The sun, shorn of his beams, was a disk of copper; the sun-track in the sea, a trail of blood. The clang of every ship's bell, the scream of every whistle, gave us new hope; but we were still waiting, waiting, waiting. Port Townsend stands knee-deep in the edge of a sea-garden.

With the morning coffee came a rumor of an Indian village on the neighboring shore. We were already past it, a half hour or more, but canoes were visible. Now this was an episode. Jack, the cabin-boy, slid back the blind; and as I sat up in my bunk, bolstered among the pillows, I saw the green shore, moist with dew and sparkling in the morning light, sweep slowly by—an endless panorama. There is no dust here, not a particle. There is rain at intervals, and a heavy dew-fall, and sometimes a sea f

Sitka, the capital of Alaska, sleeps, save when she is awakened for a day or two by the arrival of a steamer-load of tourists. Fort Wrangell, the premature offspring of a gold rumor, died, but rose again from the dead when the lust of gold turned the human tide toward the Klondike. Juneau, the metropolis, was the only settlement that showed any signs of vigor before the Klondike day; and she lived a not over-lively village life on the strength of the mines on Douglas Island, across the narrow st

Probably no one leaves Juneau with regret. Far more enjoyable was the day we spent in Ward's Cove, land-locked, wooded to the water's edge, and with forty-five fathoms of water of the richest sea-green hue. Here lay the Pinta and the Paterson , two characteristic representatives of the United States Navy—as it was before the war—the former a promoted tug-boat, equipped at an expense of $100,000, and now looking top-heavy and unseaworthy, but just the thing for a matinée performance of Pinafore,

Hour after hour and day after day we are coasting along shores that become monotonous in their beauty. For leagues the sea-washed roots of the forest present a fairly impassable barrier to the foot of man. It is only at infrequent intervals that a human habitation is visible, and still more seldom does the eye discover a solitary canoe making its way among the inextricable confusion of inlets. Sometimes a small cluster of Indian lodges enlivens the scene; and this can scarcely be said to enliven

We appreciated the sun's warmth so long as we were cruising among the ice-wrack. Some of the passengers, having been forewarned, were provided with heavy overcoats, oilskin hats, waterproofs, woolen socks, and stogies with great nails driven into the soles. They were iron-bound, copper-fastened tourists, thoroughly equipped—Alpine-stock and all,—and equal to any emergency. Certainly it rains whenever it feels like it in Alaska. It can rain heavily for days together, and does so from time to time

Sitka has always seemed to me the jumping-off place. I have vaguely imagined that somehow—I know not just how—it had a mysterious affinity with Moscow, and was in some way a dependence of that Muscovite municipality. I was half willing to believe that an underground passage connected the Kremlin with the Castle of Sitka; that the tiny capital of Great Alaska responded, though feebly, to every throb of the Russian heart. Perhaps it did in the good old days now gone; but there is little or nothing

Katalan's Rock towers above the sea at the top corner of Sitka. Below it, on the one hand, the ancient colonial houses are scattered down the shore among green lawns like pasture lands, and beside grass-grown streets with a trail of dust in the middle of them. On the other hand, the Siwash Indian lodges are clustered all along the beach. This rancheria was originally separated from the town by a high stockade, and the huge gates were closed at night for the greater security of the inhabitants; b

Sitka is the turning-point in the Alaskan summer cruise. It is the beginning of the end; and I am more than half inclined to think that in most cases—charming as the voyage is and unique in its way beyond any other voyage within reach of the summer tourist—the voyager is glad of it. One never gets over the longing for some intelligence from the outer world; never quite becomes accustomed to the lonely, far-away feeling that at times is a little painful and often is a bore. During the last hours

When Captain Cook—who, with Captain Kidd, nearly monopolizes the young ladies' ideal romance of the seas—was in these waters, he asked the natives what land it was that lay about them, and they replied: "Alaska"—great land. It is a great land, lying loosely along the northwest coast,—great in area, great in the magnitude and beauty of its forests and in the fruitfulness of its many waters; great in the splendor of its ice fields; the majesty of its rivers, the magnificence of its snow-clad peaks