And How Brightly Then Do The Red Berries Of The Dogwood Shine Out From
The Warm Yellow-Green Of Leaves And Mosses!
But still more interesting and significant are the glacial phenomena
displayed hereabouts.
All this exuberant tree, bush, and herbaceous
vegetation, cultivated or wild, is growing upon moraine beds outspread
by waters that issued from the ancient glaciers at the time of their
recession, and scarcely at all moved or in any way modified by post-glacial agencies. The town streets and the roads are graded in
moraine material, among scratched and grooved rock bosses that are as
unweathered and telling as any to be found in the glacier channels of
Alaska. The harbor also is clearly of glacial origin. The rock
islets that rise here and there, forming so marked a feature of the
harbor, are unchanged roches moutonnees, and the shores are grooved,
scratched, and rounded, and in every way as glacial in all their
characteristics as those of a newborn glacial lake.
Most visitors to Victoria go to the stores of the Hudson's Bay
Company, presumably on account of the romantic associations, or to
purchase a bit of fur or some other wild-Indianish trinket as a
memento. At certain seasons of the year, when the hairy harvests are
gathered in, immense bales of skins may be seen in these unsavory
warehouses, the spoils of many thousand hunts over mountain and plain,
by lonely river and shore. The skins of bears, wolves, beavers,
otters, fishers, martens, lynxes, panthers, wolverine, reindeer,
moose, elk, wild goats, sheep, foxes, squirrels, and many others of
our "poor earth-born companions and fellow mortals" may here be found.
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