"I have a large, beautiful state-room alone--every state-room on these steamers is an outside one; the entire steamer is richly carpeted in soft moss-green; finished in the native woods, polished till you could use the woodwork for a mirror (and if it reflected you how decorative it would be!); beside that, there are mirrors galore, of the regulation order, and a news-stand with all the world's literature, so to speak; the most delightful bathrooms, but I don't spend the entire time at sea in salt baths, as you unkindly { 203} assert; the table is excellent, being rather noted, I am told, for its fine cuisine, and there is to me a very direct connection between delicious coffee and various accompaniments, and feeling 'up' to things for the day; anyway, everything is delicious, and the splendid, spacious decks to enjoy a paradise of walking on; writing-desks well stocked with stationery at every turn, on every deck; and these steamers are 'twin-screw' if you know what that means! I confess I don't! but apparently people who do know consider a 'twin' screw as of far more importance in the universe than one lone, lorn screw; and they are equipped with wireless telegraph (I do know what that means) and with oil engines, and every modern device of safety, and with fairly luxurious comfort; and, indeed, the whole voyage is ideal and has only one fault--alas! alas! that it will come to an end. If only it would never end! I count off the flying hours as a miser counts his gold, I can hardly bear to sleep to miss one hour of its glory and loveliness, yet sleep, too, is a joy in this magical air, and, at all events, this voyage will not be ended when it is over. I shall have it all the rest of my life ... to live over again and again 'in the ethereal,' where all outer experiences find their record. I am quite sure the Recording Angel sets this down in illuminated pages."
From Puget Sound 500 miles of the voyage is through Canadian waters, so vast is the Dominion. For one hundred and twenty miles the steamer is { 204} sailing through the Straits of Georgia, which separates the main land of British Columbia from Vancouver Island, with the range of the Olympic Mountains astern, from whence the gods look down on mortals. Do they not, indeed, dwell on Olympian heights? Passing into the Seymour Narrows from the Georgian Strait, the Channel is hardly more than one third of a mile wide, and the rocky walls with the lofty mountains just behind are so overgrown with trees as to present an almost solid wall of emerald green, tempting the passenger to reach out his hand and grasp the cedar needles that seem so near. On sunny days the reflections in the water are bewilderingly clear, and here and there pour down rushing cataracts of foam-crested water from the melting snow of the mountains.