Dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands,
flying through space with other stars all singing and shining
together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of
beauty.
The California coast-hills and cliffs look bare and uninviting as
seen from the ship, the magnificent forests keeping well back out
of sight beyond the reach of the sea winds; those of Oregon and
Washington are in some places clad with conifers nearly down to the
shore; even the little detached islets, so marked a feature to the
northward, are mostly tree-crowned. Up through the Straits of Juan
de Fuca the forests, sheltered from the ocean gales and favored
with abundant rains, flourish in marvelous luxuriance on the
glacier-sculptured mountains of the Olympic Range.
We arrived in Esquimault Harbor, three miles from Victoria, on the
evening of the fourth day, and drove to the town through a
magnificent forest of Douglas spruce, - with an undergrowth in open
spots of oak, madrone, hazel, dogwood, alder, spiraea, willow, and
wild rose, - and around many an upswelling moutonne rock, freshly
glaciated and furred with yellow mosses and lichens.
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, was in 1879 a small
old-fashioned English town on the south end of Vancouver Island.
