firma at Kalama, a few miles above the mouth of the Cowlitz River.
Kalama, like most railroad towns not terminal, is a. failure, because it can show no raison d'etre. It was started when the Portland Branch of the Northern Pacific was being constructed from the Columbia to the Sound, about 1870, and the company's head-quarters were established there, which were, on the completion of the road, removed to Tacoma. It was also made the county-seat of Cowlitz County, which did not save it from decay. But I am assured that the place is feeling a return of life in sympathy with the present upward and forward movement of the whole State, which has for several years been enjoying a rapid growth. We do not tarry long here, but speed on our journey to the "Mediterranean of the Pacific."
About the time the N. P. Railroad was being located from the Columbia to the Sound I made my first visit to this region. In that day we took an open mail-wagon at Monticello, near the mouth of the Cowlitz, for the drive to Olympia, having to cross Pumphrey's Mountain at the forks of the Cowlitz by a very rough road with rarely a human habitation along it. But it was in July, and I enjoyed the ride, break-downs and all. What struck me then was the magnificence of the timber. Such a forest as that on Pumphrey's Mountain was something to have seen. Trees straight as Ionian columns, so high that it was painful to bend one's neck to see the tops, and with a diameter corresponding to their height. If there is anything in nature for which I have a love resembling love to humanity, it is for a fine tree. The god Pan and the old Druidical religion are quite intelligible as expressions of the soul struggling "through nature up to nature's Cod," and one is at once in harmony with the sentiments of grandeur and solemnity, akin to worship, which a scene such as this inspires.
Added to the awe which the mighty shafts of fir, naked for a hundred and fifty feet, and the "dim religious light" filtering through their closely-meeting tops, awakened in my mind at that time, was a secret dread of encountering in these shadow halls of silence something unusual—and terrible—a brown bear or a cougar, for instance; but nothing more appalling than a gray hare, some grouse, and mountain quail attempted to
