of you, but how different! The city is at your feet, to and from whose busy wharves all sorts of water-craft are darting and departing, while the west shore of the bay, Port Blakely and other headlands receding melt into a dim distance bounded by the Olympic Mountains. On the other hand, Lake Washington lies just at the foot of the eastern slope, with green islands and wooded shores, and Mount Rainier, towering in white, eternal majesty above this summer landscape.
The lakes about Seattle, to which I have before referred, never ceased to be interesting to me from their evident physical history; at the same time they are very pretty from a scenic stand-point, with sloping shores admirably adapted to villa sites, for which they are being rapidly seized upon. Lake Union is small, with a number of settlements almost surrounding it. There are three asthmatic little steamers running from the railway approach to Fremont, Edgwater, Latona, and Green Lake, on its borders. Pleasure-boats are to let, and a dancing-hall furnishes the foreign population the opportunity of the waltz on Sundays.
A small canal, which it has been Seattle's ambition to have enlarged by the government into a ship-canal, connects Lakes Washington and Union with the Sound. Had Congress seen fit to undertake this not very expensive work, a naval station might very well have been located here where vessels could lie in fresh water, and doubtless the work will yet be performed for the benefit of commerce, vessels lying in the Sound waters becoming heavily encrusted with barnacles. The teredo is very destructive to any wood immersed in the Sound, and to the supports of wharves, which frequently succumb to its ravages; hence the value of a fresh-water harbor. Port Orchard has several streams running into it which may suffice to cure this evil, but Lake Washington would have been more certain to be free from it.
The falls of the Snoqualmie (Indian Snoqualimich) River having frequently been mentioned to me as highly attractive, I resolved to devote a day to an excursion along the line of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, whose western end is in Seattle and its eastern end in Spokane, with a considerable hiatus between. I found the following stations along the road
