These Are Far Less Interesting And
Characteristic, However, Than The Mansions Set In The Midst Of
Spacious Pleasure Grounds And The Lovely Home Cottages Embowered In
Honeysuckle And Climbing Roses.
One soon discovers that this is no
Yankee town.
The English faces and the way that English is spoken
alone would tell that; while in business quarters there is a staid
dignity and moderation that is very noticeable, and a want of American
push and hurrah. Love of land and of privacy in homes is made manifest
in the residences, many of which are built in the middle of fields and
orchards or large city blocks, and in the loving care with which these
home grounds are planted. They are very beautiful. The fineness of
the climate, with its copious measure of warm moisture distilling in
dew and fog, and gentle, bathing, laving rain, give them a freshness
and floweriness that is worth going far to see.
Victoria is noted for its fine drives, and every one who can should
either walk or drive around the outskirts of the town, not only for
the fine views out over the water but to see the cascades of bloom
pouring over the gables of the cottages, and the fresh wild woods with
their flowery, fragrant underbrush. Wild roses abound almost
everywhere. One species, blooming freely along the woodland paths, is
from two to three inches in diameter, and more fragrant than any other
wild rose I ever saw excepting the sweetbriar. This rose and three
species of spiraea fairly fill the air with fragrance after a shower.
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.
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