est to con-
sume. Halsey, on the line of the Southern Pacific, ships annually nearly three hundred thousand bushels of grain, and is a flourishing town.
Above Albany the pine-tree begins to appear, mixed with the fir, along the river-banks. The groves of timber are more scattering, and the country more level and open. Except the ash, maple, alder, and willow of the river-bottoms, there is little forest; but the isolated trees of pine, fir, and oak which beautify the plains are of the handsomest proportions.
Corvallis, a dozen miles above Albany, on the west side of the river, is about the same age with it. It first proprietor was J. C. Avery, by whom it was incorporated in 1857. The situation of Corvallis is remarkably handsome, having the river on one side of it, and the Coast Eange sufficiently near it on the other to give the landscape the look of being framed in a semicircle of hills. Its name, Corvallis, a corruption of coeur de vallee .— heart of the valley,—was given to it before Mr. Avery ever saw it. He called his town site Marysville, but, there being another Marysville on the California mail-route, the name was dropped, and the more significant one restored. This pretty little city is the seat of government of Benton County, which also has a seaport town, namely Newport, at Yaquina Bay, which is the initial point of the Oregon Pacific Bailroad, and also a popular summer resort. A commodious hotel is all that Newport needs to bring many visitors there every season. At Seal Rock, eight miles south of Newport, about seventy persons can be accommodated in cottages.
The entrance to Yaquina Bay in its natural state was not good, there being not more than eight feet of water on the bar at low tide, and three nominal channels. The channel most used was rendered dangerous by the presence of rocks, and the shifting nature of the bar left none of them safe for navigation. In 1881 the government commenced the work of improving the middle channel by a jetty three thousand seven hundred feet in length, which in 1884 was extended to four thousand feet. Another jetty, on the north side, was constructed in 1888, two thousand three hundred feet in length, with the result that there is now nearly twelve feet of water on the bar at low tide. A line of steamers runs regularly between Newport and San Fran-
