Saturday, November 30, 1867.

A long and serious illness has prevented me from recording some important events. Yesterday, though weak and debilitated, I for the first time in four weeks attended a Cabinet meeting. When last at the Council room I was quite ill, came home and went on to my bed which I did not leave for twenty-one days, except once, on the 7th, for a few moments, which did me no good. Thanks to a good God, my health is restored, for which I am indebted to the faithful nursing of the best of wives, and the kind attention of my physician.

Little of interest was done in Cabinet yesterday. The President and all the Cabinet manifested great pleasure on seeing me. Each of them has been friendly in calling during my illness, the President sometimes twice a day. To-day the President laid before us his annual Message. A sound, strong, good document.

After its perusal, and running criticism, he submitted a letter addressed to the Cabinet, stating the condition of affairs, the proposed impeachment, and the proposition to suspend the President, or any officer when impeached, until after his trial and judgment by the Senate. There was great uncertainty of opinion on the subject in the discussion.

That the President should submit to be tried if the House preferred articles, was the opinion of all. That he should consent to, or permit himself to be arrested or suspended before conviction, was in opposition to the opinion of each and all.

General Grant said it would be clearly ex post facto to pass a law for suspension in the case of the President, and unless the Supreme Court sustained the law, it ought not to be submitted to. If Congress should pass a law directing that officers should be suspend

ed whenever the House impeached the officer, that would be a different thing. Then it would be the law, known in advance.

I agreed with General Grant that a law in the President's case would be ex post facto and therefore to be resisted, if attempted. But I went further and denied that Congress had authority to suspend the President the Executive - a coördinate branch of the government on the mere party caprice of a majority of the House of Representatives.

Mr. Randall was very emphatic in denouncing such a movement as destructive to the government.

General Grant said he thought a mere law of Congress would not justify suspension or authorize it, but that there should be an amendment of the Constitution to effect it.

We all assented that if the Constitution so ordered, submission was a duty, but not otherwise.

A few days since, the Judiciary Committee, who have been engaged by direction of the House to search the Union, ransack prisons, investigate the household of the President, examine his bank accounts, etc., etc., to see if some colorable ground for impeachment could not be found, made their several reports. A majority were for impeachment. Until just before the report was submitted, a majority were against, but at the last moment, Churchill, a member from the Oswego, N. Y., district, went over to the impeachers. Speculators and Wall Street operators in gold believed that a resolution for impeachment would cause a sudden rise in gold. Unfortunately for them, no rise took place, but there was a falling off. If Churchill was influenced by the speculators, as is generally supposed, his change did not benefit them, and in every point of view was discreditable to him.

Boutwell, who made the report to the House, is a fanatic, impulsive, violent

an ardent, narrow-minded partisan, without much judgment, not devoid of talents, with more industry than capacity, ambitious of notoriety, witha mind without comprehension and not well-trained; an extreme radical, destitute of fairness where party is involved. The report was drawn up by Thomas Williams of Pittsburg, a former partner of Stanton's, a rank disorganizer, a repudiator, vindictive, remorseless, unscrupulous, regardless of constitutional obligations and of truth as well

as fairness, [who] was put upon the Committee because he had these qualities. The other three gentlemen of the majority may be called smooth-bores, men of small calibre, but intense partyism. The report and its conclusions condemn themselves, and are likely to fail even in this radical House. Whether such would have been their fate had the election gone differently, is another question. The voice of the people1 has cooled the radical mania, and checked their wild action.

1 The recent elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

ACROSS Vancouver harbor the mountains loomed dimly blue in the deepening twilight. High up on the steep, rocky slope was a big brushwood fire, and its warm, red glow was reflected, pastel-like, in the clouds above and the quiet water below. Down on the shore of the inlet a heap of sawmill refuse was burning, and between us and the blaze towered a tall square-rigged ship — a black network of spars and ropes against the glare. Cityward a huge white shape, a little ghostly in the dusk, but graceful even now, told where the Empress of India lay in her berth at the Canadian Pacific wharf. Pushing hard against the swift incoming tide, we swung round the point, threaded the Narrows, and struck out upon the broad, dark, lonely waters of the Gulf of Georgia.

By morning we were in a land of granite and sandstone, where the islands rose steeply out of the sea in lofty hills and mountains, with no level shores, no sandy or pebbly beaches, no green meadows or grassy intervals. The sky was gray and gloomy, and the wind that came down the channels was looking for the marrow of one's bones and found it. There were spurts and dashes of rain, and torn shreds of mist went trailing along the hillsides or climbed slowly up the forest-clad slopes to join the heavy clouds that hung low overhead. In the higher ravines the tops of tall trees stood up out of snowdrifts fifty or a hundred feet deep.

A day or two later we sat in a handloggers' shack on the shore of a small, land-locked bay, where, under the shadow of the hills, our launch lay at

anchor. The rain was roaring on the roof, a brook was brawling under the floor, and through the flimsy walls, made only of rough stakes split out of red cedar logs with an axe, the damp, chilly wind blew whithersoever it listed. There was not much use in shutting the door, and most of the time it stood wide open. Looking out, one saw the inlet all black and white under the pelting of the storm, with the forest standing guard around it, dark and gloomy and solemn. The cedars drooped their branches mournfully, as if they had lived under dull gray skies, weighted down with snow and rain, and wrapped in wet, clammy mists, till they had lost all hope of ever being cheerful again.

'It is n't as pretty as the woods back east,' the Civil Engineer remarked.

He was right, without a doubt. 'Pretty' is not the word for the splendid robe of trees and undergrowth and mosses that is the glory of British Columbia. For one thing, the rich, live, virile tints of the hardwoods are almost entirely absent, and the coloring is left a little dull and sombre, for nearly every tree is an evergreen, and an evergreen forest is never as green as a deciduous one in summer. There is much dead timber, also, to add its tinge of gray or brown, and the straight, lancelike lines of the bare trunks, shorn of their bark and branches, together with the sharp, steeple-like tops of the living, give the whole landscape a strange 'up-anddown' effect. For this is the western 'Country of the Pointed Firs.' The rolling billows of foliage that make up a forest of oak or maple or beech are missing here, and in their place is something that looks like a city of church spires set as close as they can stand. It is as if the hillsides were stratified in thin, strongly-marked layers that stand on edge instead of lying flat one upon another. It is interesting, but it

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is not always pleasing. And that day, under that leaden sky, with every branch and twig dripping with rain, the world was dreary and woebegone. But if it was not pretty it was imposing. Beside the giant cedars certainly, and spruces and balsams and hemlocks that stood guard round our little harbor, those of the east would have been but dwarfs and pygmies. Everything was on the scale of Brobdingnag. And it was more than imposing, for there are few scenes anywhere that have more of character and individuality than these woods and hills and mountains. There is something in them of sadness and mournfulness, and yet of strength and dignity-something of the look of one who has lived in the wilderness till solitude has put its ineffaceable mark upon him, and he no longer knows how to mingle with his fellows, yet who has grown strong through loneliness and has learned to lean on himself and be quiet. They are wild and desolate, but they are big and strong and noble, and one night we were shown what British Columbia can do when it really tries to be beautiful-not prettybeautiful.

It had been raining all day, as usual, and it was still raining when, after supper, we stepped into the skiff and pulled out to the launch. Through the early evening we sat in the cabin, copying timber-estimates, figuring totals, and laying out the work for the morrow; but about ten o'clock we went out for a drink from the tin gasoline cans that stood on the after deck, and did duty as. fresh-water casks. The clouds had blown away, the stars were flashing, the moon rode high, and the inlet was a great, flawless mirror for the mighty woods that stood looking down, silently, tranquilly, on their own images in the bright, still water at their feet. Everything that was ugly, everything that was ragged or unkempt — the