new acquaintance caused some of his friends to get up an evening's entertainment for him. Later, another new acquaintance took him as a guest to the young men's club of the leading church of the city. About him sat 200 stalwart, manly fellows. Their wives, sisters and sweethearts served the assembly with refreshments. A literary and musical programme was given in a homelike, social way. As a stranger, he was invited to say something. At no time an after-dinner speaker, he now felt somehow at home. Not knowing what else to say, he told them of what many knew best-life in the mountains. He waxed eloquent under their applause and talked forty-five minutes. As he concluded, the good pastor praised his effort. Everybody applauded. Then those people stood about him and sang several popular hymns such as he could join in, conIcluding with Auld Lang Syne. Then, for half an hour that guest held a levee. That man went east, but he came back to Seattle to live.

Webster called this region "a coast of 3,000 miles, rockbound, cheerless and uninviting, without a harbor on it." The Puget Sound country alone has as many good harbors as half the Atlantic seaboard. The little town of Port Angeles, of which the East scarce ever hears, probably has the best. Seattle's is nearly or quite as good. Then there are Port Orchard, Tacoma, Everett, Port Townsend, Port Blakely, Eagle Harbor, Port Madison, Port Ludlow, Port Gamble, Pleasant Harbor, Seabeek, Ballard, Holmes Harbor and a dozen more. Almost any of these will receive a battleship, yet some have not even a village or a post-office. Pleasant Harbor, on Hood's Canal, would furnish safe anchorage, for thirty Oregons or lowas, and any one of them could enter at quarter, if not low, tide, yet there is not so much as a decent cabin on that beautiful and secluded body of water. There are many miles of water-front that will furnish depth for the deepest draft ocean-going vessels, 250 feet from shore. One famous admiral has declared he could tie to the trees. There is scarcely a sunken rock or reef in the entire Sound region. The shelter is perfect, the scenery sublimely grand. Almost anywhere in the Sound region, south of the straits, the shelter is safe for largest vessels in these harbors or out in the Sound.

The waters of this vast Sound fairly teem with fish, clams and oysters, the latter capable of improvement. No less than ninetyfive varieties of food-fish can be secured in the Sound and its vicinity, and the vastness of the cod-banks of the Pacific can as yet be only conjectured. They seem limitless.

The millions of acres of flat, swamp, valley and slope of all the Sound region was, twentyfive years ago, the most heavily timbered territory of any size in North America. It seems at present to be hardly touched. There are groves of larger trees in California, but these are of but small area. Probably no place on earth will average acre for acre the timber that the Puget Sound region can furnish. It is fir, cedar, spruce, hemlock and alder, as well as maple and other woods. Its Douglas fir-the most common variety has been found superior to yellow pine and other woods heretofore used for carbuilding. It is now claimed that government tests show that it is better for ship-building, having greater horizontal strength than oak or Georgia pine, and superior lasting qualities. One big firm is now making heavy shipments of this fir to Germany for use in the warships of the Kaiser's new navy. The standing timber of the Puget Sound region is estimated at 114,000,000,000 feet. 30,000,000,000 feet have been cut during the past fifty years. The growth is very rapid, thirty years producing a fair-sized tree.

Only

The agricultural area is as yet comparatively small, but once cleared, the best of this land is easy of cultivation and the yield is beyond belief. Every acre will not produce

THE LONG SWEEP OF WHARVES

fifty or seventy bushels of wheat, but some will, and many will yield forty, which is double the average of other states. The tide lands of La Conner have been known to yield 130 bushels of oats to the acre, and the average is double that of any other portion of the United States. Three thousand pounds of hops have been grown on an acre in the Sound country, but that is extraordinary. An average of 1,500 pounds can be obtained, as compared with 700 pounds in eastern fields. Live stock needs nothing more than a shed to shield it from the rains, and a little fodder two months of the year. The dairying business is increasing about twenty-five per cent. per year.

The mines of the state, strange to say, have never been developed in proportion to their worth, although mining men are now awakening to their error, and are becoming aware of the riches so near at hand. It is now known that there are coal, silver, gold and other mining riches here, and the development is something hard to keep track of. One year ago a local authority declared that if the gold veins already uncovered in Washington are properly developed for five years they will produce $12,000,000 per annum, and keep it up indefinitely. Seattle has an assay office, which was opened in July, 1898, and which already ranks third in the United States, having received during the two and a half years of its operation between $40,000,000 and $50,000,000 worth of precious metal.

Many years ago Capt. Renton, a blind man, established a lumber mill on Blakely harbor, just across the bay from Seattle. That

plant is to-day the largest saw-mill in the world. It has a capacity of 275,000 feet every ten hours, it runs night and day, and its annual output is from 100,000,000 to 125,000,000 feet. It owns a large fleet of ships, it is constantly building more at its own yards, it loads them at its own wharves and sends its product to all parts of the world.

Robert Moran, scarcely yet in middle life, is perhaps the most notable case of individual achievement in the northwest. Born in New York, his childhood was hard and toilsome. At the age of fourteen he had left home, gone to Cincinnati and was doing a man's heavy work in the great rolling mills. Twelve hours over red-hot iron and before the heat of blazing furnaces was not enough for this ambitious youth. He studied long hours after others slept. In 1874 he packed his few possessions and went to New York, there to pay his last cent for passage to San Francisco, via Panama. Before he reached San Francisco, an unknown philanthropist discovered that this boy of seventeen was "broke" and after urging him to go on to Seattle, where the great city of the Pacific coast was one day to be, paid his fare. When Robert Moran reached Seattle, early in '75, he had not a penny. His education was such as a boy may gain who has worked in a rolling mill from the day he was old enough to run about. His first work in Seattle was performed for "big Bill Gross," a negro restaurant keeper, to pay for food. Later he was hired as cook in a logging camp, and as he had never cooked he was "fired" for the first and last time in his life. Gaining a job as fireman on a Sound

steamer he bought books and a drawing board and when he was not working he studied diligently. He was carried, as assistant fireman on the old " ant fireman on the old "Cassiaire," to the Sticksen river and there within a year, by his superior nerve and coolness in times of danger, he was made chief engineer and pilot. Old timers tell how he stood seventy-two hours at his post, eating such food as was brought to him.

The first money he could save went east, and in due time his mother, his sisters' and his brothers joined him in Seattle, and within ten years Moran Bros. had the best machine shop in the northwest. There were many triumphs during those ten years, notable among them was his first contract from the government, for the construction of great pumps at the then embryonic navy yard at Port Orchard. The