from being dashed to pieces against the great rocks. The captain guides the barge of cattle to the centre of the channel. He puts the barge and the steamer in the very heart of the current and we shoot with a rush between two of these mighty fingers of rock down into the rapids below. As we pass, it seems as though the rocks are not more than three feet away on each side of our steamer.

A little farther on we ride under precipices of sand that extend straight up from the water as though they were cut by a knife, with strata as regular as those of a layer cake. They seem to be made of volcanic ash or glacial clay. They rise to the height of the Washington Monument and are absolutely bare of vegetation, save for the lean spruce and pine on the tops.

We pass the "Five Fingers" between one and two o'clock in the morning, when the sun is just rising. This is the land of the midnight sun, and there are places not far from here where on one or two days of the year the sun does not sink below the horizon. Even here, at midnight it is hard to tell sunrise from sunset. There is a long twilight, and the glories of the rising and the setting sun seem almost commingled. At times it has been light until one o'clock in the morning, and I have been able to make notes at midnight at my cabin windows.

There is a vast difference between this region and the rainy districts near the Pacific coast. We have left the wet lands, and we are now in the dry belt of the great Yukon Valley. The air here is as clear as that of Colorado. The sky is deep blue, the clouds hug the horizon, and we seem to be on the very roof of the world, with the "deep deathlike valleys below." We are in the country of

Robert Service, the poet of the Yukon, and some of his verses come to our minds:

I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That's plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I've watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I've thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o' the world piled on top.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE CAPITAL OF THE YUKON

WRITE of Dawson, the capital of Yukon Territory, the metropolis of the Klondike, and for years the richest mining camp of the world. In the height of its glory it had more than thirty thousand inhabitants, and in the region about there have been more than sixty thousand people. To-day the population of the town is less than one thousand. With the gradual exhaustion of the gold the population is decreasing, and it may be only a question of years when the precious metal will all have been taken from the ground and the chief reason for a city here will have disappeared. One of the great hopes of the people is in the discovery of rich quartz mines or the mother lode from which all the loose gold came. The hills have been prospected in every direction, but so far no such find has been made.

Dawson lies just where it was located when gold was discovered. The houses still stand on the banks of the Klondike and Yukon rivers where the two streams meet. The town is laid out like a checkerboard, with its streets crossing one another at right angles. They climb the sides of the hills and extend far up the Klondike to the beginning of the mountains of gravel built up by the dredgers. The public roads are smooth, and the traffic includes automobiles and heavy draft wagons. There are more than fifty automobiles in use, and two hundred and fifty

five miles of good country highways have been made by the government in the valleys near by.

Dawson has been burned down several times since the great gold rush, and vacant lots covered with the charred remains of buildings are still to be seen. Most of the stores are of one story, and log cabins of all sizes are interspersed with frame houses as comfortable as those in the larger towns of the States. Scores of the homes have little gardens about them, and not a few have hothouses in which vegetables and flowers are raised under glass. Empty houses and boarded-up stores here and there show the decline in population.

This is the seat of government of Yukon Territory and the district headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Here the judges hold court, and here the commissioner has his residence. The government house is a large yellow frame building with a wide porch. In front of it is a beautiful lawn, and beds of pansies border the walk that leads to the entrance. At the rear are gardens filled in summer with the most delicious vegetables grown in the Yukon, and near by are the hothouses that supply the tomatoes and cucumbers for the commissioner's table.

Yukon Territory is next door to Alaska, and its resources and other characteristics are so similar that it might be called Canadian Alaska. Its southern boundary is within thirty miles of the Pacific Ocean, and the territory extends to the Arctic. It is a thousand miles long and in places three hundred miles wide, and it comprises almost as much land as France. It is one third the size of Alaska from which it is separated by the international boundary, which crosses the Yukon River about one hundred miles from here.

The Dawson of to-day has none of the earmarks of the Dawson of the past. It has now several churches, a city library, radio concerts, women's clubs, sewing societies, and afternoon teas. The palatial bars where beer cost three dollars a bottle and champagne twenty dollars a pint have long since disappeared. The hymns of the Salvation Army have taken the place of the songs of the dance halls, and in the hotel where I am staying is a Christian Science lecturer who is drawing large crowds.

The order on the streets is as good as that of any town in New England, and educationally and socially the place is the equal of any of its size in the States. There is still a large proportion of miners, but most of them are connected with the great dredging and hydraulic operations, and the independent prospectors are few. There are many business men and officials, as well as lawyers and doctors. Now and then Indians come in to sell their furs to the traders. The stores have large stocks of goods and handle most of the trade of the Yukon and some of that of eastern Alaska.

For the first few years after gold was discovered in the Klondike everything was paid for in gold dust or nuggets, and the store-keepers had their gold scales, upon which they weighed out the price of their goods. Every miner then carried a gold poke, and paid for a cigar or a drink with a pinch of dust. To-day the only place where one can use any coin less than a quarter is at the post-office, and there the change is in stamps.

Visiting a grocery store, I saw cantaloupes selling at seventy-five cents apiece, chickens at three dollars, and eggs at a dollar a dozen. These are the summer prices. In the heart of midwinter, when the hens go on a