W E went down to the Columbia River salmon-fisheries with no great enthusiasm. A packer in Portland had told us with pride of the automatic machinery and cookers of his establishment, but somehow the vision of so many hundreds or thousands of tin cans of fish in process of filling and cooking was not especially inspiring. A world-old charm attaches to the toil and peril of the fisherman's life, here dulled in prospect by the thought of automatic machinery. But we were destined to be pleasantly surprised. So far from detracting from the picturesqueness of the life, the modern methods here introduced have added to its color, diversity, activity, even peril, giving it a charm peculiarly its own. I shall long retain my first impressions of the ancient town of Astoria and the broad mouth of the Columbia River. It was a typical day on this coast: a chill atmosphere, though July, low-hanging leaden clouds shutting in and hushing all the scene, a gray landscape that seemed to drip and flow with moisture, the soul of it the majestic river, wide, smooth, noiseless, setting outward to the sea. On each side rose lonely pine-clad hills, those on the distant shore dim and hazy. Nearer at hand was the wooden town of Astoria, all dripping and gray, with long, low warehouses reaching out on stilts into the river. Far below, blurs on the water, were the boats of the gill-netters, drifting out to sea with the tide. Universal grayness, wetness, and the thick smell of the sea, of watersoaked piling and tide-flats, and fish and fish-this was Astoria. That night I heard the muffled roar of a distant fog-horn, and I went to sleep to the sound of water among the wooden piers under my room. Astoria is one of the most picturesque of American towns, quaint and old, having been founded by the early explorers and trappers who came to this country nearly a hundred years ago. Long the outpost of John Jacob Astor's trading company, it was once taken by the British and held as a frontier fort. Placed here on the steep river-edge, where there was rightly no room for a city, and finding it difficult to crowd its way up the hill, the town has reached out over the river, many of the streets, banks, stores, hotels, canneries, and warehouses being set up on piling, with the tide sweeping through underneath. Step off the sidewalk, and drop twenty feet into salt water; look through the cracks in the little court of the hotel, and see the dark river swirling beneath, and smell the barnacled piling. Even the railroad that now reaches the town comes in on legs, centiped-like, a long bridge of piers across a river bay. It is a strange, interesting, not unambitious old town, set about with net-drying platforms, slippery fish-wharves, canneries exhaling the odor of cooking fish, the little, low homes of fishermen and net-makers of many nationalities, from Norwegian to Portuguese; the crowded tenements of Chinese and Japanese workers in the canneries; and, higher up the hill, the more pretentious homes of the packers and business men. Here and there an Indian or two, remnants of a passing tribe, look on imperturbably at the usurpation of their ancient fishing-places. When the tide favors, the river beyond the wharves is busy with the heavy boats of the fishers, and often, more distant, on the mighty river one sees an ocean craft bound up for Portland or down again to the sea. At daylight, the world being half water and half fog, we took passage with the captain of the El Hurd, John Weik, Finlander, a salty old man, whose instinct for the shifting channels of the great river was that of the salmon itself. Every day, at the slack of the tide, Captain Weik steams down the river, nosing in bay and inlet of the com the salmon-grounds, visiting pany's scows, taking in the fish left there by the individual gill-netters, seiners, trappers, passing a good word with fisher and scowman, and returning with his load to the canneries and cold-storage warehouses. He and the tug-fashioned El Hurd are the connecting-links between the sea-work and the shore-work of the salmon-fisheries. The river at Astoria is like a great arm of the sea, nine miles wide, and over ten miles to the open ocean beyond the breakwater. Steaming slowly, for the time of slack water had not yet come, we saw the fog lift and the sun rise, the glorious epochs of this Oregon morning, and we came cheerfully to the wide stretch of Baker Bay, near the mouth of the river. Here, in placid shallows, stretch the salmon-traps, with net-poles and piling rising thickly above the water in every direction, giving to the bay the appearance of a dead forest recently submerged. Captain Weik, driving the El Hurd through the shallows as though he felt the channel with his hand, brought up alongside one of the traps, where we passed up a hawser and hung below with the ebb-tide. The two trapmen in their clumsy boat were inside the piling, expectantly raising the net, in which already premonitory splashes gave promise of a good catch. It is the trap that has wrought so powerfully, especially in the northern fisheries of Puget Sound, for the success of the salmon industry-a device which takes the fish with a certainty and cheapness unknown to the older methods. It consists simply of webbing, hundreds of feet long, strung on poles or piling driven into the bottom ends of the earth in time for the evening editions. England still, the past and the present inextricable-at once a patchwork and a growth. Creeping disentanglement for the machine, then another rush, and a smear that means a mining village. Compensation at hand in George Eliot's country. A dip in the road-Griff, the home, snug in its hollow, and lovely still. A rise, and the turning to castellated Arbury, the Cheverel Manor of “Mr. Gilfil's LoveStory." Chilvers Coton (Shepperton) beyond, and then Nuneaton (Milby or nothing), the girlhood's haunt. Clear of all that, after a good run, the Ashby-de-laZouch of Mary Stuart's captivity, and of "Ivanhoe." Next, the Derby of Celt and Roman, Saxon and Dane, of the Pretender's march, and Heaven and history only know what beside. Mr. Gooding is able to give full fifteen minutes to its memories, for the machine calls a halt for more fuel. It is hardly enough for the depth and breadth of it in dateless time. Roads that the legions once trod, especially the legion recruited in Spain, with many a brown cheek and flashing eye in the surviving peasantry to tell the tale. Ipstones hard by, with its townsfolk, British to this day in every essential of race type for soul and body-keen eyes, black hair, manner that is all nerves: some tribe that escaped exterminating conquest-the Corvi, perhaps-by the accident of a river full of ravines, roads all tracks and byways, a sort of British Transvaal. The Corvi keep shop there now, immune from the tourist as from the Roman, but ready, behind their counters, to make the modern invader pay for all. A long swerve to the right,—rather a blunder of Mr. Gooding's,—and Ollerton as a starting-point for the dukeries. You may cover them with a hat, though it must be a Quaker's of the old school. The agent's house, castellated, if you please, to mark his state, a placid stream banked with dense trees, bushes, and osiers, and exquisite in its windings of luminous shade. Then Thoresby Park, a dukery, though now the seat of an earldom; and in the distance the manor, a mass of modern masonry seen through the glass, but softened by the blue haze into perfect keeping with the sylvan scenery. Workmen's houses a picture, like everything else on the estate-Arcadia in a ring-fence. Up hill and down dale, the road stretching to the horizon; but courage! and presentlyClubmer. Magnificent glades of woodland, deer, red (and proud of it), bracken to your waist. In a clearing an old inn, with its sign the arms of the "family," "Loyauté n'a honte," as Mr. Gooding makes it out in the rush, and the ribbon of the Garter conspicuous in the decorative scheme. Hard by, one of the gates of the estate; and presently the house, seen through an opening in the deep woodsItalian in the general scheme, and a mere thing of yesterday, being less than a century and a half old. Then the great gate, with a long, long avenue of limes as exquisitely trimmed as anything at Allonby. Out of the park again, by another gate of weather-stained stone, and now the road to Welbeck. Lodges the trailing growths of which might earn for England a subtitle of the Flowery Land, but little life of man or beast here or anywhere else. Now and then a laborer; now and then a game-keeping giant, white-bearded, perhaps, and rednosed, each effect ever keeping pace with the other in intensity. But the men are rare, the villages rarer still. It is yet an unpeopled land, with scores of square miles waiting for effective settlement, vast wastes of beauty in virgin forest or cultivated park. Welbeck at last, an ordered scheme of grandeur like the rest, massive, endless, and finally burrowing underground in architectural caves of Kentucky, as wondrous as anything above. The whole region, like distant Allonby itself, manifestly a government within a government, with England lying outside. To Worksop Manor now, a dukery still by courtesy, as having once been the seat of a duke. Thence, quitting the charmed circle, a long run for Chatsworth imperative for Mr. Gooding, though his machine begins to pant for rest. But he calls on it, and it answers, and whirls him to new scenes, one of them a lurid city of Dis, on the edge of the coal region, turreted with chimneys belching fire in the broad day, its river of hot water from the works steaming to the sky. Unwashed gangs on the roads, day-shifts going home, after relief by night-shifts, as yet shining from soap and towel, who are deep, deep under the soil-a perpetual motion of labor to feed the mighty estate above. It is a ducal colliery, and its grime is soon effaced by the beauties of the valley that lead to the last great house on the list. Wild moors, grim gorges, hill-slopes of purple heather, with patches of grass showing through, and of gray primeval stone polled with undying mosses; beetling rocks with wooded summits; streams crossed by rustic bridges, and with villages to match-in one word, every imaginable beauty of hill and dale to atone for the valley of doom we have just left. A wayside inn now, with a "Devonshire Arms" to warn us in whose country we are. Then the park, a calm as of Eden, and more red deer, facing round at the new enemy of sylvan peace to cover the flight of their hinds. Chatsworth at last, the great house seen through an opening in the immense circuit of leafage by which it is screened, and with a river flowing in its front. No time to pause now for the belated traveler; but he well knows what lies beyond. A place that starts fair with a mention in Doomsday, and a product of all the centuries since in planning, building, collecting for art and luxury and the pride of life. Building and rebuilding. Tower added to tower, and hall to hall, age by age. Wren one of its architects; the Scotch queen one of its prisoners. In happier times a school of landscape-gardening surpassing the inventions of Eastern fable. A cloying mass of wonders in which a man not to the manner born of the best in life might hardly hope to sleep a wink for the throbbing sense of the wonders of his lot. But there is no time to linger. Daylight is beginning to wane, and miles yet lie between the traveler and the place to which he has telegraphed for rooms. So, doubling on his route again, he makes for supper and bed at the same pace as before, with only his blazing lamps and the guideposts to show the way. They are hardly enough for a man who does not know it already. The gloom deepens; the very mile-stones are now mute; the great silence begins, and a void of miles of country without a single wayfarer. To make matters worse, the machine strikes work, and for a full hour its driver fusses and fumes over it without result. It moves again at last, but slowly, and as though only under his own compulsion of want of rest and refreshment. And then a new trouble. A certain sickening softness in the sense of motion warns Mr. Gooding that he has left the road. He alights in haste, to find himself on turf, and "In Sherwood Forest." "Where else, if you expect an answer to the bugle-horn ?" "The way to Edwinstowe, if you please." CONVERSATIONAL preliminaries are naturally brief when one has the appetite of an ogre. In a very few minutes Mr. Gooding was at work on the squarest meal the van could afford, with his host looking on. It was not a bad meal. The little larder produced pressed beef and pickles, a slice of tongue, a loaf of brown bread, a bottle of stout. A lamp threw a roof ray on host and guest. The van stood in deep shadow. Seen from a distance, they would have looked well-a bit of the void of darkness. redeemed to comfort and light. It was another lecturer this time. Threescore and five was about his age. His high cheek-bones, roundish head, keen glances flashing through the mere slits of his eyes, even the crisp, curling hair, were all so many signs of one about equally ready for the word and the blow. No fear of the latter just now. He was evidently in his most expansive mood as he watched his guest. |
