with unlimited room. Swinomish Slough, which is navigable for large vessels only at high tide, is to be deepened, when it will afford a passage from the south into Padilla Bay.
Sailing-masters find the prevailing winds of the country to be from the southeast and northwest. Both are fair winds into Ship Harbor and out of it. Ships require no towing, but sail up to their docks unaided, and such is the depth of water that the largest vessel afloat need not fear to do so.
The present permanent population of Anacortes is two thousand two hundred and fifty. At the end of the first year it had cleared two thousand acres of forest, graded and planked ten miles of streets, completed a system of water-works, built three saw-mills, a sash- and door-factory, an iron-foundry and machine-shop, blacksmith- and wagon-shops, a steam-laundry, a ship yard, eleven miles of electric-railway (almost completed), four railroad depots, four hotels, five handsome brick blocks, and expended altogether in building improvements over half a million dollars, besides another quarter of a million in wharves and warehouses. It has two newspaper establishments and good public schools. Banks and other moneyed institutions are on the ground doing a good business.
Such is Anacortes, the Venice of the Pacific. I shall often throw down my pen to dream of that matchless sea, over which she elects to preside and over which I floated in June days, taking mental photographs which cannot fade, in company with the kindest of entertainers.
CHAPTER XXVII.
FAIRHAVEN AND BELLINGHAM BAY.
Leaving Anacortes early in the afternoon by a fine steamer, I had a delightful voyage to Fairhaven, another new town on Bellingham Bay. Of Bellingham Bay, as a coal-mining port in years past, I had often heard, the first coal ever mined in Washington coming from here. The discovery was made by William Pattle, a British subject, in 1852, who spoke of it to Henry
