that the clouds rolled away sufficiently for us to see them. The two peaks, called the Lions, are wonderfully faithful outlines of the lions in Trafalgar Square. The Indian Mission village lying under the mountains, looks clean and bright.
Vancouver has a beautiful park. We drove eight miles round one afternoon and were delighted with it. It is the virgin forest preserved in its natural forest glades, with magnificent Douglas firs, spruce, white pine, cypress, aspen poplar, mountain ash, and giant cedar, whilst bracken ferns and moss grow luxuriantly on the decaying trunks. The road is traced by the side of the sea and English Bay, and the smell of the salt water mingles with the fragrance of the pines and cedars. Some of these pines are colossal in girth and height, though not equal to the big trees of the Yosemite. The cedars are great in circumference, but not of such height, and the finest specimens are sadly mutilated by lightning.
The seeds of eternal enmity were sown between Vancouver and Victoria when the former became the port of the railway. This animosity is carried to great extremes. A Victoria man will not ensure his life in a Vancouver office. Sarah Bernhardt is coming here next week, but because she refused the Victorians' offer of $1000 more, Victoria has determined to boycott the performance at Vancouver, and make it a failure. Their childish jealousy may be likened to that between Melbourne and Sydney, and Toronto and Montreal. We are sorry not to have time to go to Victoria. I believe it is very pretty, for everybody out here has said: "Oh! you must see Victoria, it is so pretty, and so very English." This, abroad, is not precisely a recommendation in our eyes.
Our last afternoon in Vancouver, we went across to Burrard's Inlet, to see the Moodyville Saw Mills. The enormous trunks are raised, attached to hooks, by a pulley out of the water on one side, passed under a saw whose two wheels whirl through and cut up the timber in a few minutes. It is sawn into three planks by another machine, laid on rollers, passed down on the other side of the mill and shipped into the steamer loading at the wharf. In three minutes a tree that has taken 300 years to grow (you can reckon its age, if you have patience, in the concentric rings on the trunk), will be sawn up; in fifteen minutes it will be cut, planed and shipped. The trees we saw operated on were chiefly Oregon pines.
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