Chapter XVIII: Part II (1)

Trusty to his promise, the porter calls us at early dawn. The train is rushing between massive walls of rock, rising to unseen heights and confining the railway to the bank of a swift green river. The official is already up, and standing upon the rearmost platform with closely buttoned coat, for the morning is chilly in the shadows of these Alps.

“This is The Gap,” he explains, “through which Bow River comes out. We follow it almost to its sources, before we come to Kicking-horse Pass, through the central range, or Main Divide. Better have the ladies called. We shall be at Banff in an hour, and they ought not to miss any of this.”

He touches an electric button, directs the responding porter to summon the Vassar family, and we return to the platform.

The Gap has now been traversed, and we can see the great mountains on each side of it. Then we turn northward and run along the river between gigantic upheavals. Their tops are half hidden in the lingering night-mists, but rifts now and then reveal bristling, snow-crested peaks, rosy with premonitions of sunrise, and tiers upon tiers of cliffs bounded by long lines of snow resting upon narrow ledges, and broken by gorges of unmeasured depth filled with blue shadows and swirling fog. It is a wonderful, inspiring, never-to-be-forgotten sight. Awakened and driven out by the skirmish line of the hosts of the morning, the clouds reluctantly forsake their rocky fastnesses, and more and more of the rugged grandeur and height of the bordering ranges, right and left, come out. Soon far-away peaks show daintily, “like kisses on the morning sky,” as one of the ladies expressed it, in imagery chaste, no doubt, but rather cold; and finally, as we sweep toward the face of the gigantic precipices of Cascade Mountain (which seem to rise courteously and advance to welcome us), even the valley shakes off its blanket of haze, and sunshine pours over the crystal heights to sparkle upon dewy leaves and glistening river.

Under these brilliant auspices we step out of the car and into a carriage at Banff, and are whirled away to a great hotel, built upon the grandest site in Canada.

“This hotel is the Company’s property, and here you are to be my guests for the day,” was the command of our genial official, as he registered the names of the party. “It is too early for breakfast. Let us go to the upper balconies and have a look at the mountains. This is Canada’s National Park, you know, and she is proud of it.”

What a picture that north-western balcony opened to us! In the foreground green rolling woodland dotted with turfed openings and the red roofs of cottages or white dots of tents. Then the tortuous and shining course of the Bow River, sweeping gracefully to the right. On the left, steep and wooded slopes; ahead, high mountains--some with their splintered spires towering above rugged and darkly forested foothills, others more distant and breaking into jagged outlines, gashed by blue gulfs and piled with snow, others still farther away, filmy and white upon the western horizon, where the water-shed of the continent rises supreme and superb. Nearer is the cliff-fronted mass of Cascade Mountain, 5,000 feet high, its slender waterfall trembling like a loose ribbon down its broad breast--the badge of its identity. Past it, through a rocky gap, our eyes follow the lower Bow, sparkling with ripples, parted by islets, shadowed by leaning spruces and cottonwoods, to the green ridges where the railway runs, and on to where the white wall of the Fairholme range, a massive rank of heights, upholds wide spaces of stainless snow.

“Just behind that mighty wall, whose tallest peak--Mt. Peechee--is over 10,000 feet in altitude,” our friend tells us, “there is an immense cañon, occupied by a narrow and very deep lake. The Indians believe it to be haunted by malignant demons, and I don’t wonder at it. Cliffs thousands of feet in height rise straight from its margin, and its waters are shadowed by the Devil’s Head and other peaks, that can be seen for a hundred miles out on the plains. To cruise upon its surface in a canoe and catch the monstrous trout that lurk in its coves, while the echoes of your talk and paddling wander from scaur to scaur, and wild goats come to the edge of the crags to look down upon you, is an experience not to be duplicated easily anywhere else in the world.”

“What is this lake called?”

“Devil’s or Devil’s Head Lake. We will drive over there this afternoon, if you like. I think the views you get from that road are the best of the whole park scenery, unless, perhaps, you except the view of Mount Massive and the Main Divide from a boat on the Vermilion Lakes. Now let us go to the other end of the building.”

“Here,” he continued, when we were gathered upon the south-eastern balcony, “you are looking _down_ the line of the Rockies, instead of up their length, as you were before. This is the valley of the Spray, which joins the Bow just below the hotel.”

We could not see the river, but we could hear its rushing, and readily believed our friend’s stories of the trout in its pools. On the left of the valley long slopes of whitish limestone rose bare and glistening with dew far above the forest, until they terminated in two sharply cut peaks, from which fell suddenly away, for many hundreds of feet, the precipices that we had half seen earlier that morning. This was Mount Rundle--an excellent type of the mountains of stratified limestone, shaped like wedges laid upon their sides, in parallel rows north and south, which constitute the eastern half of the Rocky Mountain system in this part of the world. The eastern aspect of all these ranges, therefore, is a rank of precipices--tier upon tier of nearly or quite level ledges of limestone, strongly indicated by banks of snow and lines of trees--broken into separate headlands, and bordered at their base by bush-covered slopes of débris. Here and there a great gap allows you to pass to the rear of these headlands, when you find them sloping back with much regularity into the forest-covered valley, beyond which another rank of cliff-faced promontories again confronts you, and so on until the central water-shed is reached.

“Why does that curious little cloud stay so persistently on the slope of that hill?” asked one of the ladies, pointing to the right.

“That is the steam from the hot springs,” was the reply, “and after breakfast we will walk up there.”

The hot mineral springs at Banff lie along the base of Sulphur Mountain, where they flow from exits round which great masses of tufa have been built up. The upper spring, some 700 feet above the river, commands a wonderful view of “peak o’ertopping peak,” with green vales and broken crags between. From this spring a large stream of sulphurous water, at a warmth of 120° F., is conducted down to the hotel, to supply the luxurious bath-houses. More plebeian arrangements exist at the spring itself for bathing and drinking the waters, which have proved wonderfully efficacious in curing a great variety of diseases, especially obstinate cases of rheumatism and dyspepsia. Two miles distant, up the Bow, are two other prominent springs--one an open basin, and the other a large pool, occupying a dome-shaped cavern built out of its own depositions when it was more copious, and this is now a most curious place. Originally, the only way of reaching the water was by squeezing one’s self through the chimney at the top of the dome and sliding down a slippery ladder, like entering a Tchuckchi house in Siberia. Now a tunnel has been bored through the side of the dome, level with the surface of the diminished water, and you go straight in from your dressing-room in the rustic cottage at the entrance. Another pretty cottage admits to the open pool. In both the pool and the cave the water is pleasantly warm, clear and almost tasteless, though highly impregnated with salts, giving it a close resemblance to the Arkansas Hot Springs. These improvements of the springs, and the good roads throughout the Park, are the work of the Government, which is making easily accessible all the most interesting localities and best points of view.

We could have spent a week in this most delightful spot--rambling, climbing, sketching, shooting (outside the Park limits), fishing and boating. The beautiful river and lakes, and the falls, have hardly been mentioned, even. But time presses, and next morning sees us reluctantly resuming our journey.

From Banff we pushed straight westward through wooded defiles into the upper valley of the Bow, where the scenery is upon an even grander scale. On the left runs a line of magnificent promontories--prodigious piles of ledges studded with square bastions and peaked towers. On the right is a gray sloping wall, 5,000 feet high, of slaty strata tilted on edge, and notched into numberless sharp points and splinters, like the teeth of a badly hacked saw. Between the two, right in the foreground, stands Castle Mountain, isolated, lofty, brown and yellow, vividly contrasting with the remainder of the landscape, and terminating in a ruinous round tower from whose top pennants of mist are waving more than a mile above our heads. As we roll past its base it gradually changes from a lone castle tower to an escarpment of enormous cliffs. These can be climbed, and the expectation of what the outlook would be is more than realized.

But we must not forget in the grandeur of the Castle the splendid peaks fronting the valley on the left--Pilot, a leaning pyramid poised high upon a pedestal of square-cut ledges; next to it the more massive summit of Copper Mountain, to which you may almost ride on horseback along an old road cut to the copper mines near its apex; then the green gap of Vermilion Pass (into the Kootenay Valley), through whose opening we catch alluring glimpses of many a haughty spire and bristling ice-crown along the Continental Divide. To the north of this gap stretches Mount Temple’s rugged wall, and beyond it, supreme over all, Lefroy’s lonely peak--loftiest and most majestic of them all.

When Castle Mountain and the steel-pointed sierra behind it have swerved to the right, we see northward the great glacier that nourishes the childhood of the Bow with milky meltings, and in the midst of a galaxy of hoary peaks the noble form of Mount Hector--a monument to the first explorer of Kickinghorse Pass. Then, leaving the Bow, we climb the gorge of a little creek and enter the jaws of a narrow gap through the central range. Upon either hand rise rugged walls crowned with Alpine peaks, framing a chaos of snow-fields, glaciers, and sharp black summits westward--some close by, and showing the scars of ages of battle with eternal winter; others calm and blue in the far distance. Yet here in the pass it is warm and pleasant: trees flourish, flowers bloom, cataracts leap and flash in the sunlight. Backward we review in profile the line of mountains we have passed; beside us are the crumbling terraces and turrets of the Cathedral, thousands of feet straight upward; ahead, reflected in a lake whose waters flow east to the Atlantic and west to the Pacific, the stately head of Mount Stephen, brandishing cloud standards and carrying with royal dignity its ermine mantle of snow and gleaming coronet of ice.

We have pierced the Rockies and are looking down the Pacific slope. Range after range of blue-and-white crests, rising from valleys of forest and prairie, burst upon our awed vision. The scene is past adequate description; we do not say much about it to one another, but only look; and when the descent has been accomplished, and some hours later we halt on the bank of the Columbia (only 100 miles from its source), we are almost stunned with the sublime panorama that has been unrolled so rapidly before our eyes, each scene more astonishing in its magnitude and beauty than the last.

Yet we have crossed only one of the three great subdivisions of the Canadian Rockies. Just ahead lie the Selkirks, and beyond that is the Gold Range. Then we shall cross a wide, hilly plateau region. Finally we must follow the Fraser River in its profound cutting through the Cascades range, before we see the coast of the Pacific. The whole distance from the eastern base of the Rockies to the coast--Banff to Vancouver--is done in thirty-six hours, and the night travel comes where there is little loss of fine scenery; but it is too much to take in at once. Our stop of only one day at Banff was not only a rest, but allowed us to become acquainted with the mountains and prepared us for what we should see ahead; and we mean to stop again at the summit of the Selkirks.

The ascent of the Selkirk range from the east is begun in a regular gateway, where the Beaver River pitches down some rocky stairs at the bottom of a chasm, and is continued along the forested side of its valley, gradually ascending until the track is a thousand feet above the stream. Here the splendor of the Selkirks is manifest in the west, where a rank of stately mountains, side by side and loaded with snow, are grandly outlined. Then we turn up a branch cañon and enter Roger’s Pass through the terrific cleft between Mount Carroll and The Hermit.

In another place[2] the present writer has described his first impressions of these singularly impressive heights--the climax of the transcontinental trip.

At the western extremity of Roger’s Pass lies the Great Glacier, where the Company has built a beautiful little hotel, within twenty minutes’ walk of the ice. It would have been nothing short of criminal to have gone past this point without stopping.

The path through the forest, the huge size of whose trees, and the redundancy of whose mossy undergrowth, bespeak our nearness to the warm coast, is along a brawling river gushing from underneath the glacier. Presently the vast slope of creeping ice is before us, completely filling the head of the gorge. All the glaciers we have hitherto seen were near the very crest of the range, but this one comes far down into the forest, so that flowers and shrubbery are sprouting all around its lower margin, whence a dozen rivulets gurgle out to feed the river. The rounded forefoot is broken, where blocks of loosened ice have been sloughed off, and seamed with numberless cracks, the commencement of further sloughings. These cracks and the freshly exposed faces are vividly blue, while liquid turquoise fills all the cavities and deepens to ultramarine in the shadows; but the general tone of the glacier, as it slopes steeply upward in billowy undulations toward the head of the ravine, is grayish white. Curving crevasses cross from flank to flank, and longitudinal rifts gash the surface as if cut with a sharp knife in an elastic substance. These crevasses may be as blue as the clearest sky, or sometimes green as young grass, according to the light; and between are often pure-white patches of fresh snow. Toward the top (where the breadth is nearly two miles) the slope is still steeper and the surface smoother; but along the very crest, jagged and hard against the sky, thousands of fractures appear, indicating how the mass of ice breaks, rather than bends, as it is pushed over the cliffs. These breaks then reunite, and the chaos becomes the smoothly congealed and undulating surface we see below.

“This glacier,” the official remarks, “is only one of several overflows from a _mer de glace_ occupying a plateau on the summit, scores and perhaps hundreds of square miles in extent. It is continually crowded over the edge through breaks in the rim of cliffs, and thus room is made for the new deposits of snow annually heaped upon its frigid wastes.”

For several hours we scrambled about the edges of the ice. On its right is a huge moraine, which we climbed for a few hundred feet and thence ventured out upon the glacier itself, but could go only a few steps, for we had no spiked shoes, alpenstocks, ropes, or other appliances for safety. Greater in size than any of the Swiss glaciers, its exploration needs at least equal precautions. On one side a cave in the ice remains to mark the former exit of some now diverted stream; and when we entered it we found ourselves in an azure grotto, where the very air was saturated with blue and we expected to be turned into petrifactions of sapphire.

All the morning there rests upon the ice-slope the huge triangular shadow of Sir Donald--a superb pyramidal pile of cliffs, shooting its slender apex far above all its royal mates--Ross, Dawson, Carroll, The Hermit, and Cheops--and cleaving clouds that have swept unhindered over their heads. It is imperial in its grandeur and separation from the rest, and nowhere shows more magnificently than when we look back from a point far down the pass, and can see how royally this richly colored, elegantly poised spire soars exceedingly sharp and lofty above the group of lesser mountains--themselves monarchs of the range--grouped sublimely about it. These were the pictures we saw as, refreshed by a night’s slumber in the balsamic air of the spruce-clothed mountains, we renewed our journey next morning, and from the foot of Ross Peak gazed back with amazement at the tortuous descent our train had made around the loops and trestles that had “eased” us down from Roger’s Pass and Glacier Station to the bank of the Illicilliwaet.

This river, fed by unmeasured stores of snow and ice kept in a circle of heaven-piercing peaks, rushes away down a series of densely wooded and rocky gorges. With much ingenuity the railway follows it to the Columbia, which has made a long detour around the northern end of the Selkirks since we last saw it. Here is Revelstoke, a railway headquarters, the limit of steamboat navigation, and the supplying centre of many mines. Behind it are lifted the western outliers of the Selkirks; before it, beyond the Columbia, is the Gold Range, some of whose glacier-studded peaks constitute a grand view.

The Gold Range is easily crossed. Eight miles beyond the Columbia bridge, we have risen into Eagle Pass, which is only 1,900 feet above the sea, and are gliding past lake after lake nestling between magnificent headlands. Trees 200 feet tall fill the pass and encircle the lakes in a close and continuous forest, and wherever a ledge or bit of easy slope allows soil to cling, the rocky crag-sides are clothed with luxuriant foliage. It is the White Mountains, or the Blue Ridge, doubled and trebled in scale. Each of these deep, still lakes is filled with fish, and along the Eagle River, which leads us westward out of the pass through a darkly shaded ravine, are many camps of sleepy Indians fishing for salmon.

As evening approaches we escape from the hills and run along a connected series of long, narrow and very deep bodies of water, penetrating between hills and ridges covered with unbroken forest. This polypus-like lake is called the Great Shushwap, and is as large as Cayuga, Seneca, and all the other lakes in Western New York would be were they connected by navigable straits. Fed by several strong rivers, it forms the reservoir which guarantees a steady supply to Thompson River, by whose side our train will run all night.

“These lakes are wonderful places for sport,” says the official. “Salmon and several other fish are numerous, and every kind of game abounds. It is an almost untouched field, too, although facilities for getting over an immense region of wild country, by steamboat, sloop or canoe, are exceedingly good.”

“What are we missing in the night?” asked Miss Vassar, as darkness blotted out the landscape and the cheery lamps were lighted for the last of so many jolly evenings together in this overland voyage.

“You don’t miss much until toward morning; and that you may get a fair idea of by moonlight if you sleep on the right-hand side of the car. We are getting entirely past and away from the mountains now, into a plateau country of grassy hills where farming (except by irrigation) has small success, but grazing is a great industry. At midnight we go through the important town of Kamloops, the headquarters of this grazing region, which extends for hundreds of miles southward, and is interspersed with many gold and silver mining localities. Then we pass Kamloops Lake and get into the cañons of the Lower Thompson River. There the scenery is very curious. This is a dry country--looks like California--and the rocks and earthen river-banks have been carved by wind and occasional deluges into the most fantastic and gayly colored of monumental forms, through which the waters of the racing Thompson mark a sinuous line as green as the purest emerald. It’s a very extraordinary, grotesque landscape, but having seen it once in daylight, I, for one, am satisfied to go through henceforth by night. After we leave the mouth of the Thompson at Lytton, however, and begin to descend Fraser River, the scenery becomes very grand and beautiful; so you must get up early once more.”

How shall I tell in a few words what those Fraser cañons are like? They are not like the thin, abysmal clefts of Colorado, nor the weird corridor through which the Missouri makes its way.

The Fraser is the main water-course of British Columbia, and comes from the far northern interior. It is a broad, heavy, rapid stream, flowing between steep banks sloping ruggedly back to the mountains, whose white and shapely peaks stand in splendid array before us at Lytton. The railway is at first on the eastern bank, and high above the turbulent yellow river, which is soon compressed into a narrow trough, where the hampered water rushes and roars with frightful velocity. Cliffs rise for hundreds of feet with out-jutting buttresses that almost bar the passage. Huge rocks, long ago precipitated into the water, have been worn “into forms like towers, castles, and rows of bridge-piers, with the swift current eddying around them.”

Near Cisco advantage is taken of a particularly narrow strait to cross the river upon a huge cantilever bridge, the farther end of which rests in a tunnel. The scenery here is savage, but the air is soft and the sky clearest blue. As we proceed, the cañon rapidly becomes narrower, deeper, and more terrific; the river, a series of whirlpools among knife-edged rocks. The railway pierces projecting headlands in short tunnels, springs across side-chasms, and is supported along sharp acclivities by abutments of natural rock or careful masonry. Finally the constantly heightening wall on the opposite side culminates in the crag of Jackass Mountain, which rises 2,000 feet in a well-nigh perpendicular mass--a second Cape Eternity. Nearly 1,000 feet above the boiling torrent, and often overhanging it, the wagon-road built years ago to connect the Fraser River gold mines with the coast creeps about its brow; and the little party of Indians trotting along this airy pathway look like pygmies or gnomes who have come out of some stony crevice to see us pass. Yet four-horse stages were driven here for many a year, and before the road was built men traveled afoot over the trail which preceded it, passing places like these on swinging pole-bridges, something like the foot-ropes under a ship’s yard-arm. Thrilling stories of that trail and road in the fierce old mining days of ’58 and ’64 are recorded in books and told by the “mossbacks” one meets up and down the coast. But since the building of the railway the wagon-road is little traveled, though the Cariboo district northward, and other districts south of the line, still yield gold and silver bountifully under systematic mining.

As we roll steadily onward through long shadows projected across the gulf by the rising sun the cañon alternately expands and contracts, but never loses its grandeur. The queer little figures of Chinese gold-washers dot the gravel-bars here and there (we can’t help wondering how they got down there!), and on almost every convenient rock near the river’s edge are perched Indians with large dip-nets, industriously scooping in an eddy after loitering salmon. Their rude bivouacs are scattered about the rocks; and their fish-drying frames, festooned with the red flakes of salmon-flesh, among which the curing smoke curls as lazily as Siwash smoke might be expected to do, add the last touch of artistic color to the picture.

But a painter will be attracted constantly by the form and color of the bronze-brown chaotic rocks, the tawny, foam-laced river, the gaunt, desperately rooted trees, and the brilliant azure of the sky. And everywhere he will find handy a foreground-bit of “life”--gold-diggers, mule-trains, Chinese red-labeled cabins, Siwash “wickiups” and barbarically adorned graves, or some trim railway structure--to lighten the composition with a sympathetic human touch.

At North Bend we get breakfast in a charming hotel, and then go on again, past the important old town of Boston Bar (now abandoned to the Indians) and over the bridge above Skuzzy Falls, which come sliding down fern-strewn rocks in cataracts of lambent emerald. Gradually the cañon walls grow high again, and encroach more and more upon the channels. The railway passes from tunnel to bridge and bridge to tunnel in quick succession, always curving and costly. It is one long gallery of wonders. Ponderous masses of rock, fallen from the cliffs and long ago polished like black glass, obstruct the current, which roars through narrow flumes between them and hurls showers of spray far up their sides. This is the Black Cañon of old settlers; and an idea of its tortuous narrowness may be got from the fact that in freshets the choked-up water will rise a hundred feet above the ordinary level.

At the foot of this cañon is Yale, an old trading post and frontier town, ensconced in sombre mountains. As the head of navigation on the lower Fraser, it was once the leading town of the Province, and still has some 12,000 inhabitants. A few miles farther on is another similar village, Fort Hope, which is at the limit of steamboating, and is charmingly placed in front of a cluster of brilliant Cascade peaks. At times the figure of a colossal anchor is marked in snow-banks upon one of these summits; whence the name of the village--for is not the anchor the emblem of hope? In these mountains rich silver lodes await development.

Gradually the cañons and cliffs are left behind, and we gather speed on a level track through woods of prodigious growth. The river becomes a broad and placid stream, “backing up” here and there into lagoons, and making prairies utilized for herds of cattle. Beautiful mountains show themselves in every direction--last and finest of all, Mount Baker, fifty miles away.

At Agassiz many passengers leave the train to visit the Harrison Hot Springs, at the foot of Harrison Lake, five miles northward. This is one of the pleasantest watering-places on the coast, and a most interesting spot for sport and amusement. Harrison Lake and its outlet into the Fraser, with other lakes and portages, formed the foremost route to the northern interior twenty-five years ago. Its waters were then alive with steamboats, and the roads with wagons and pack-horses; but now the route is quite abandoned, and its wayside habitations have fallen into decay.

At noon we scent the saline odor of the ocean, and presently come with eager curiosity to the shore of Burrard Inlet. Half an hour later we are at Vancouver, and our transcontinental trip has reached its western terminus.

Two years ago a saw-mill represented civilization, and a dense forest covered the peninsula between Coal Harbor (a widening of Burrard Inlet) and English Bay (an offshoot of the Gulf of Georgia), where now a city of 5,000 people is established. The town is crescent-shaped, rising with gentle ascent to the ridge overlooking the open gulf, the heights of Vancouver Island and the Olympic and Cascade ranges in Washington Territory. Upon this high ground a group of residences has already arisen, whose windows command a wonderfully beautiful view of water and mountains.

The town has been built with great rapidity, but the wooden houses first thrown up are fast giving place to substantial buildings of brick and stone. All the improvements of modern civilization have been introduced; business and agriculture flourish; mining and the fisheries are engaging more and more capital, and the foundations of a great and beautiful seaport have been laid.

Thus the Canadian Pacific Railway is, in fact, a new way round the world!

[2] “Mountaineering in British Columbia.” A lecture delivered
before the American Geographical Society, in Chickering Hall,
January, 1886.

A CRITICAL SITUATION.

BY S. SMITH.

As I was walking through one of the principal London streets the other day, on my way to fulfil a business engagement, my attention was attracted by one of those huge posters which plentifully besprinkle the walls of the city. In resounding tones of red, blue and bright vermilion, it called the attention of the public to the fact that the stirring sensational melodrama, of deep domestic interest, entitled “For Life or Death; or, the Grave’s Witness,” was then being performed to overflowing audiences at the Royal Lorne Theatre. Just above the printed announcement was a picture representing one gentleman apparently in the act of boring a hole in the floor with another gentleman’s head, and which I took to bear reference to the printed notification below.

My momentary curiosity satisfied, I turned to proceed on my way, when my eyes encountered those of a man standing by my side--a man whom I had not noticed before, and who might have been the very ghost of a sandwich man instead of a sandwich man in the flesh, so suddenly and quickly had he come upon me. Yet, there he unmistakably was, his tattered old frock-coat, once the pink of fashion, frayed at the edges, worn to shreds at the seams, and bulging at the elbows; the trousers darned and patched in a dozen different places, but now gone far beyond the last stage of repair; the patent-leather boots broken and down at heel, and almost soleless; the battered white hat, with black band round it, and the brim all but gone; the bulbous red nose, the trembling mouth and the bleary eyes that told their own tale. I stood for a moment staring at this sudden appearance without any particular reason, and he, in his turn, staring at me. The pause, awkward enough in all conscience, was of that character in which one of the parties feels impelled to make an observation of some kind in order to get decently away. Before I could open my lips, however, my companion anticipated me.

“Striking sort of picture, that,” he said, in a dry, husky voice, and with an apologetic kind of sniff.

“If coloring has anything to do with it, I should certainly say it was striking enough,” I replied.

“Ah!” he returned, “you seemed interested in it; but I’ll warrant you’re not half so interested in it as I am. There’s not a soul in all this city that understands that picture as I do. The worst of it is, when I once start looking I’m unable to leave it for thinking of what this play once did for me. Then the police have to move me on, and that gets me into trouble. Even if I would forget the past, I may not, for--look here!”--he pointed to the two boards slung over his shoulders as he spoke, and showed me the inscription, “For Life or Death,” in lightning zigzag letters.

“Many people stop to look at the posters here and elsewhere, but there is not one of them to whom it means what it does to me. To you and them it is only a picture badly designed, clumsily cut, and worse colored. To me it is the story of my life’s ruin. Perhaps you’ll wonder what I’m driving at. If you care to listen for a few moments I can tell you.” He glanced at the open doorway of one of the old city churches near at hand. “Come in here,” he said; “it’s quiet and shady, and when there’s no one about they sometimes let me go in there for a rest. You may like to hear what I have to tell, and I shall be glad to get these infernal boards off my shoulders for a few moments.”

Thoroughly interested already in spite of myself--perhaps more by the man’s manner than anything else--I followed him. Entering the porch, he took the boards off his shoulders and placed them against the wall, and taking his seat on the bench just inside the doorway, drew a pocket handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead with it.

“To begin with,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “let me tell you that my name is Edward Morton. Perhaps you will not believe me if I say that I was once upon a time--what of all things in the world do you think--a dramatic critic! Yes, it’s true. What is more, a dramatic criticism was the beginning and end of my downfall; and this is how it happened. It was about ten years ago, and soon after I started my journalistic career in the provinces, that I took a situation on one of our great daily papers--_The Blunderer_, to wit. This I had succeeded in obtaining through the influence of a friend at court, and, for a youngster just entering the profession, it was looked upon as an immense piece of good fortune. However that may be, up to town I came, and not being quite a fool, turned my chances to such good account that I was soon spoken of on all sides as ‘a promising young man.’ I might have gone on in this way, and ultimately attained to a bald head and a sub-editorship at fifty or so, but for doing two exceedingly foolish things. I made the acquaintance of Charlie Dashwood, and I fell desperately in love with a pretty actress, and one who was quite as clever and good as she was pretty--Lizzie Rayburn--you remember her? This Charlie Dashwood was a journalist like myself--a wild, harum-scarum fellow of the speculative sort--you’ve met his prototype, I daresay; always going off at a tangent, or breaking out in a fresh place when least expected; full of extravagant ideas about the undiscovered possibilities of the press; always vaporing about the reforms he intended to originate, if ever he should edit a paper of his own. I, at that time, admiring and looking up to Charlie, not only as the best of good fellows, which he really was, but as the very prince of journalists and an original genius, which, only too late, I have discovered he was not, firmly believed in and held to him in spite of the ridicule and chaff of older and wiser heads.

“At last, one day Charlie came to me at the office in a perfect frenzy of excitement with the news that he had just taken the management of a new weekly paper called _The Bullseye_, which would make its appearance the following week, and which had, as usual, been started to fill the not particularly noticed void. ‘We’re all full up with the exception of the dramatics, and Teddy my boy, you’re the very man! I know you have ideas of your own about the way that sort of thing should be done, and here’s the opportunity. Between us, we’ll make the paper the biggest “go” in London.’

“What Dashwood said was true. I had long possessed secret yearnings that way, which I had at times confided to Charlie. For a moment considerations of prudence came to my aid, and I ventured the mild suggestion of a doubt as to whether I was quite fitted for that line of work.

“‘Nonsense, my boy!’ said Charlie; ‘I know your proper capacity. You’re sure to make a hit.’ It was a curious fact that Charlie possessed the most remarkable intuitive faculty for discovering everybody’s proper capabilities except his own.

“‘Besides,’ he added, ‘think of Lizzie!’

“That settled it. Without further ado I closed with the offer, and a fortnight later saw me installed as dramatic critic of _The Bullseye_, with the title of that publication inscribed on my cards underneath that of _The Blunderer_. The plan of operation I proceeded to act upon was this: I had long had a wholesome contempt for that class of dramatic critics forever hanging round stage doors and hotel bars, and drinking with managers and actors, so I resolved to set an example in the opposite direction by keeping religiously aloof from all association with the profession--with one exception. This was Lizzie, who insisted on receiving her little paragraph of two or three lines regularly every week, and with whom I spent each Sunday afternoon and evening at her father’s place in Twickenham, whither he had retired to spend the rest of his days, free from the smoke of Aldgate and the cares of the grocery business. There had once been some talk of a Mr. Loydall, a huge, beetle-browed, hoarse-voiced tragedian, who played heavy lead to Lizzie’s juveniles at the Olympian, but he soon found out that he had no chance with me, and after one or two tussles retired from the battle, leaving me to walk over the course at my leisure.

“As you will guess, matters were pretty well settled between Lizzie and me, and we obtained old Rayburn’s consent to our marriage whenever the _Blunderer’s_ management should recognize my merits sufficiently to advance my salary, and enable me to take Lizzie away from the stage. _The Bullseye_, contrary to everybody’s expectations--everybody, that is, outside the office--showed signs of becoming a pronounced success. My dramatic criticisms was soon one of the leading features of the journal. I had always had a notion that the withering, sarcastic style of writing was best suited to me, and this was the line I took, with such effect, that at times it became difficult to find out whether I had been praising or ‘slating’ a piece or an actor. Some people were unkind enough to say that they would prefer the latter process to the former. Needless to say that, as the power and influence of the paper increased, I soon became an object of hatred and dread to the whole profession. This only tickled my vanity the more, and I would strut along Fleet Street and the Strand of a morning meeting the scowls of passing ‘pros.’ with a stare of supercilious indifference.

“One night, entering my club at the usual hour, just before starting for the Lorne Theatre, where a new piece, entitled ‘For Life or Death,’ was to be produced that evening, I found a telegram lying for me in the rack. It was from Lizzie’s mother, telling me that Lizzie had been seized with a dangerous illness that very morning, and begging that I would proceed to the house at once. For a moment I was in a serious dilemma. At all hazards I must see Lizzie that night, yet it was imperative that I should attend the first night show at the Lorne, having for that special occasion undertaken _The Blunderer’s_ notice in place of the regular man, who was absent through indisposition.

“Then an idea struck me as I caught sight of Scrubby, the dramatic critic of _The Scorcher_, at the other end of the room, already preparing to leave. Scrubby was a reliable man, I knew, and the best available for the purpose I had in my mind. Crossing over to where he was, I showed him the telegram, and explained my difficulty.

“‘Nothing easier, my boy,’ he exclaimed, clapping me on the back. ‘Trust to me. I’m going down to the show, and will leave you a program here, marked with my notes, on my way to the office. If you’re back here by half-past ten, you’ll find it waiting. Then you can scribble your notices for the two papers from my notes, and send them in in the usual way.’

“Warmly shaking him by the hand, I accepted his offer, and hastened away to Twickenham. When I reached the house I found my darling already delirious in the first stages of a high fever, and calling for me. I remained by her side, holding her hand in mine and soothing her as best I could until she had fallen off into a fitful doze. Then I stole quietly away, whispering to Mrs. Rayburn that I would return as soon as my business in town was concluded.

“When I got back to the club I found, as I expected, the program lying in the rack, inside an envelope addressed to me. Scrubby’s analysis of the production, play and acting, was distinctly unfavorable, his marginal notes having such a bitterly acrid flavor that I concluded it must all have been very bad indeed; and so I followed suit with good interest, cutting up everything and everybody concerned in the most unmerciful manner. The notices written, I put them into separate envelopes, the one addressed to _The Blunderer_, the other to _The Bullseye_, and sent them to the offices by the club messenger. This done, I went back to Twickenham.

“Returning to town the following morning, almost the first person I met was Charlie Dashwood. I made to speak to him, when, to my utter bewilderment, he stopped me short with a motion of his hand, looked me full in the face, and slowly drew a copy of that morning’s _Bullseye_ from his pocket. Opening it, he pointed to my criticism of the production of ‘For Life or Death,’ at the Lorne Theatre, and held it up close to my eyes, then, deliberately turning his back upon me, passed on without uttering a syllable. I stared after him in a kind of daze as he rapidly disappeared. What on earth could he mean? What could he be driving at? In all my experience of him I had never known him to act so strangely. Could he be going off his head, or was I going off mine, or what?

“If I wanted an explanation I had not long to wait for one. As I entered the office, the hall-keeper handed me a letter, the superscription of which I recognized as that of the editor. I opened the letter with an unaccountable trembling at the fingertips. What I found inside was a check for three months’ salary, with a notification to the effect that in consequence of my great success in having that morning made _The Blunderer_ the laughing stock of all London, the proprietors considered it due recognition of my talents that I should not enter the office again. For explanation I was referred to the enclosed cuttings from that day’s daily newspapers. I lifted one of the slips from out of the envelope, and what then met my eyes caused me to stagger back speechless and breathless against the wall, for there in that brief announcement of the postponement at the last moment of ‘For Life or Death,’ I saw the evidence of the horrible treachery of which I had been a victim. The evidence of my own ruin, utter and irremediable, stared me in the face. I had actually written a detailed report and criticism of an audience which had never assembled, of actors who had never appeared, of a piece which had never been produced!”

* * * * *

“What need is there for me to tell you more, when you can guess the rest for yourself? You don’t want to hear that I and the papers with which I had been connected became the by-word and scoff of England, and that _The Bullseye_ in particular never survived the shock. Nor do you need to be told that the few hundred enemies whom I had contrived to raise around me by my exceeding smartness turned the story in all ways so as to tell to my disadvantage, or that my journalistic career, which meant my livelihood, was practically at an end, if you can understand the charitable eyes with which an editor would be apt to look upon that kind of mistake. Whatever I tried, wherever I went, London or the provinces, it was always the same--the black shadow pursued me and closed every door in my face. Lizzie, of all the world, was the only one who clung to me in my trouble, and insisted on carrying out her promise and marrying me in the teeth of her parents, who threw her off when they found her bent on allying herself to a pauper. She struggled on by my side for two years, comforting and sustaining me in our bitterest adversity with her love and faith, until one day she died in my arms, and the light of my life went out. Then, having nothing else in the world to cling to, I clung to the drink the while it dragged me down, down, down to what I am.

“One thing more I have to mention,” said the sandwich man, as he rose from his seat and proceeded to hang the boards over his shoulders again; “it was one day some months after the events described that I met Scrubby. ‘I can’t for the life of me understand how you came to fall into that terrible blunder,’ he said, ‘especially after the note I left for you, telling how we had all gone down to the theatre on a wild-goose chase, only to find that the piece was postponed until the following week.’

“‘Note! Left for me by you!’ I ejaculated.

“‘Yes!--No! now I come to think of it, I didn’t leave the note. I wanted to go down to the Parthenon to see the new burlesque, but I gave it to a man who said he would be passing the club and would hand it in. Let me see. Ah! I have it now--you know him--Loydall, the Olympian heavy lead.’”

A VISIT TO DEATH LAKE, FLORIDA.

BY LIEUT. W. R. HAMILTON.

Some years ago, I was stationed at Fort Barrancas, on the west coast of Florida, and at the mouth of Pensacola Bay. It was the custom of the military authorities every summer, as the sickly season approached, to order all the troops stationed in garrisons along the southern coast into camps among the pine-trees to escape the fatal yellow fever. The camps were selected with a view to health and isolation combined.

In the year of which I write, we were ordered up into the pine woods about thirty-six miles north-west of Pensacola. The camp was several miles from the only line of railroad then existing in that country, and fifteen miles from the nearest settlement, which happened to be a railroad and telegraph station also. The yellow fever had already broken out with terrible violence in New Orleans, and all the southern coast was alarmed. Of course, we were obliged to maintain the strictest quarantine to prevent any communication between our camp and the outside world. This was necessary, as the country soon became filled with refugees from the plague-stricken districts, yet it made our existence particularly doleful. We received fresh meat only once a week, and, as it was brought in an open cart thirty-six miles in the hot sun, the term _fresh_ was about all there was of that significance about it. We lived on potted meats and canned vegetables and fruits almost entirely. Nothing was allowed inside the lines except the mails, and even they had to be disinfected outside before admission. News of the outside world was from a week to ten days old, and as the weather was extremely hot, it can be easily imagined that our existence was not particularly rose-colored.

Judge, then, of the delight and pleasure we all experienced when, one sultry evening, when the very air was quivering and dancing with heat, an old man came into camp with a large basket full of beautiful little fresh-water fish. How he passed the line of sentinels no one cared to inquire, the probability being that the guards, knowing what a boon he had in his basket, winked at his passing. He came direct to the line of officers’ tents, and in five minutes had sold all his fish at a good price. We asked him where the fish came from, and he answered “Death Lake.” I had heard of “Death Lake” a number of times, and the negroes in the neighborhood always spoke of it with bated breath and a mysterious air, so that my curiosity concerning it was much aroused. I therefore asked the old man to my tent, where I could talk to him about it. After he had seated himself and taken a drink of cool water, fresh from the spring, I asked him the name of the fish and when and where he caught them.

“They be brim, mister, and they wuz caught by me early this mawnin’ in the lake.”

“But where is the lake?” I inquired, “and why is it called Death Lake?”

“Wal,” he answered, “it lies about six miles from here, in the middle of a big swamp, and it is called Death Lake, I reckon, because no one can’t git there without losing his life.”

“Yet you have been there, and you are alive,” I replied.

“Yes, but I’ve most lost my life as much as a dozen times, and I’m only forty years old.”

He looked fully seventy, and he was much bowed and broken. His eyes were deep sunk, and had a watery opaqueness; his cheeks were sallow, and there were only a few straggling white hairs on his head. His answer surprised me, and I pressed him to tell me his story, which, after a while, he did, although he was much averse to it. After a time I prevailed upon the old man to take me to the lake next day. “But it is at your own risk, young man,” he said; “remember, if you dies, I told you all about it, and you can’t blame me.”

“Not if I die,” I replied; “but I am strong and healthy, and willing to take the risk.”

I easily obtained the necessary permission to leave the camp, as I was not going near the settlements, or where the fever existed, and I moreover promised to bring back a good string of fish for the commanding officer. The next morning I met the old man at daybreak, just outside the lines, and off we started together. He carried his large basket and a couple of fish-poles made of reeds he had cut in the swamps. I carried our lunch and a coffee-pot.

We tramped for about two hours through the woods, till we came to a small river called “Perdido,” from the Spanish word for “lost.” “Lost River” was a very good name for it, as it had its origin in Death Lake, and lost itself completely in the swamps after many turnings. Close to the bank, the old man had a flat-bottomed skiff moored, in which we paddled up the stream for a half-mile, when we reached the confines of the large swamp in which Death Lake is situated. The scenery here is of the typical Florida nature. On either side the stream was bounded by the swamp. Huge cypress trees lifted their weird limbs upward, and long streamers of trailing moss floated from them, and even at times formed a swinging arch across the entire width of the stream. The water was dark and sullen, and on the banks, wherever a little sunshine happened to strike, half a dozen alligators might be seen basking, which, on our approach, would flop into the water with a tremendous splash. After paddling up the sides of the swamp for a couple of miles we came to an archway, which appeared to have been cut by man through the foliage of trees and vines. It was not over four feet high and about eight wide, and from it the water flowed with a scarcely perceptible current.

“Now, Loot’nent,” said the old man, “we’ve got to go up this creek, and you’ll have to kneel down like this, for we have to stoop pretty low in places.”

Once inside the arch, it became very dark, for though the sun was shining brightly outside, it could not penetrate through the dense foliage of the vines. The little stream turned and twisted in the most tortuous channel I ever saw, and often it was with difficulty that we managed to turn the boat round the sharp and narrow corners. At length, after paddling in this fashion for over half a mile, we emerged into the famous Death Lake.