those arms close slowly but surely, strangling the lake, smothering out the teeming water life, burying the lilies, drinking up the clear warm water.

The little lake is certainly doomed by a visible and inexorable fate. But meantime it smiles in the warm sunlight; it holds an image of heaven in its bosom (and an image of death as well); its lilies bloom, the birds sing on its banks, its life teems, and its waters refresh all things near.

The simile fixed in sand and water seems very pat and apt. Who is there cannot read it?

But all similes have an obverse and a reverse. To this there is a reverse also.

On the smooth face of the sand, all round the margins of the lake, are every

where strange tracks and marks and footprints left by a grotesque and ugly life that has passed over it. Everywhere, crossing and recrossing in a net-work of sinuous lines, are paths where serpents and vipers, great and small, have come and gone. Everywhere dotting the sand are awkward squab footprints of frogs and toads, marks scraped by the bellies of lizards, rough misshapen tracks of mudterrapins. Every where blended and commingled with these marks of reptile life are stamped the pigeon-toed footprintssome big and clumsy, some little and sharp -left by awkward water-birds of all sorts and kinds that prey upon that other misshapen reptile life. For here and there a ragged scuffling mark upon the sand shows where some grotesque tragedy has happened. Perhaps all the squalor of that reptile life is even now wriggling under the smooth surface of the lake that

shows upon its face only white stars of water-lilies and a mimic image of heaven.

HE ceaseless whispering of the sands might, if the ears were only attuned to catch its murmur, tell of other things than simile and metaphor. It might, perhaps, tell of buried treasures, and of strange things seen and done in the white solitudes of its hills and valleys. For in old days, it is said, great and famous pirates used to haunt the cape and its sand hills, and chests and barracoes were mysteriously buried, most

ly at night, among the black shadows of the pines, or in the white sloping face of the sand.

Maybe a hundred years hence, when the sandy waves have rolled past and the sandy flood is gone by, some of those chests and barracoes will be left stranded high and dry for honest folk to find.

I

HAVE called Montana the Treasure State, and have shown that it is vastly larger than Pennsylvania, with prospectively many times its wealth in minerals and in the variety of its resources. But much that we find promised in Montana is amplified within the territory of Washington. The hopeful inhabitants of the former boldly adopt the motto, "The last shall be first," as if to say that amid the riches of which they find suggestion and promise all around them, they see for themselves a greater wealth-producing future than is boasted at present by any of the older States. I cannot follow them so far. There is a certainty that Washington has more varied resources than Montana, and I think that, with or without irrigation, Washington will support a larger population; but with both States it is too early for closer comparisons. The vast treasures of precious metals in Montana are sufficiently worked to give as definite a basis for hope as is found in the marvellous soil and forests of Washington, but in both States there are great areas of thirsty soil whose future is a moot point in Washington, and of which in Montana it is only certain that they yield a good return from their present use as grazing-grounds for cattle.

The Evergreen State is a huge block of land. It is as large as New England and Delaware, as Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It contains 69,994 square miles. It is 360 miles wide between the Pacific coast and the Idaho border, and to journey over it from British Columbia southward is to travel 245 miles. It is the most populous of the new States, and its inhabitants outnumber those of Oregon. In 1890, according to the last census, it contained 349,390 souls, but its people now assert that they number 360,000. They have suffered some losses in certain cities, or the increase would be from 15,000 to 20,000 greater.

The State shows to poor advantage for those who cross it upon the Northern Pacific Railroad, because the route taken by that great and well-equipped line lies across an extensive desert of sage-brush, and then crosses a vast reach of usually brown bunch-grass before it plunges into the mazes of the Cascade Mountains and rushes out from them upon the perennial

ly green Pacific slope into the Puget Sound country. But the necessities of railway construction compel a disregard for such choice of territory as would be made by an agriculturist or a sceneryhunting tourist, and, in this case, even the land granted to the railway, along its route, is in great part very valuable, though its richer parts are not always close beside the rails. Washington is in every material way a grand addition to the sisterhood of States. With the easy and rich fancy of the West, her people say that if you build a Chinese wall around Washington the State will yield all that her inhabitants need without contributions from the outer world. Nevertheless, the Chinese wall they think of oftenest is the true one, and that they wish to break down, for a trade with Asia is a thing dear to their hopes.

"If I could only have half an hour with the Emperor of China," said a talented son of Washington, in whose veins the blood of one of our most gifted orators is flowing, "I would make this the richest State west of the Mississippi. I would tell him we wanted the trade of Asia as New York has that of Europe. I would explain to him that we entertain no prejudice against his people, and mean no insult in shutting them out of our territory. I would make it clear to him that our dislike is only for his coolies, but that as for his merchants and scientists and scholars-we welcome them, we want them, especially the merchants."

Now let us look at this great State in detail, keeping in mind that it is by nature divided into two parts by the Cascade Mountains, which bisect it along a line to the westward of the middle of the State. West of the mountains is the seat of the great timber industry of the future. There the land is all heavily timbered except in the bottom-lands and at the deltas of the streams, and agriculture, though a future source of great wealth, is yet but a small factor. East of the Cascade Range there is smaller, inferior timber, but it cuts a minor figure in the wealth or character of the State, for in the main we have returned to land something like that of the other new States-we are at the end of the plains that have crossed the Rocky Mountains,