Leaving Steilacoom, we steam up the "Narrows"—a strait four miles long by one in width, through which the water runs with great force at the ebb and flow of the tide—and pass by Point Defiance, a high bluff on which defensive fortifications may, at some future time, be erected by the Government. A few miles below Point Defiance is Commencement Bay, on which the town of Tacoma is situated—the first of the great lumbering establishments we come to after passing into that wider portion of the Sound known on the maps as Admiralty Inlet; Puget Sound being, in reality, only that portion of this great body of water south of the Narrows.
On the clearing away of the mists of early morning we find the air on the Sound very bright and bracing. A slight breeze just ripples the blue waters of this Mediterranean sea; the summer sky is delicately mottled with flecks of foam-white clouds; seals sport below; birds flit from shore to shore above; a golden silence, only broken by the paddle-wheels of our steamer, wraps all together in a dreamy unreality very charming to the tourist. Occasionally a white sail, gleaming in mid-distance, adds an interest to the scene; while it, at the same time, suggests what these waters will in time resemble, when palaces shall be reflected in their margins, and the winged messengers of commerce shall glide continually from point to point of these now fir-clad slopes, laden with the precious cargoes of the Orient, making this northern sea a second Bosphorus for beauty and magnificence.
Seventy-two miles from Olympia, by steamer, we come to Seattle, the most important commercial town on the Sound. It is situated upon an inlet six and a half miles long by two wide, with a general direction
