ton side, the shores of which are covered with a thick forest of larch and pine. There you may behold two houses, rather far apart; they mark-the location of Pacific Cite,
the embryo of a great future city. For the moment, the sawmill is in repose, and though the "city" is new, the solitary houses in it already look quite old and sad.
I may remark here that, especially in the new territories, speculators in the line of starting towns and villages are very numerous. When they choose their sites well and succeed in attracting people thither, their fortune is made. But many of them simply lose their time and money. Let them adorn the places where their imaginations or private interests would see great cities arise, with great names, call them New London, Paris, Madrid, St. Petersburg or whatever you please -in most cases, nobody sets up his penates there, and though the sites be well chosen, the new capitals are soon forgotten.
Twelve miles above Pacific City (in the territory of Oregon) are the fort and little town of Astoria, or rather the two Astorias, the upper and the lower. They are only two villages as yet, rather picturesquely established on the slope of a steep hill, surrounded with thick forests of the Canada balsam. Either of them may contain twenty to thirty little houses of wood, painted white and of fairly good appearance.
After the Astorias, you go on up the river for twenty-four miles without seeing anything like a town or village. It is a succession of fine high hills, covered with dense forests, the picturesque aspect of which enchants the newcomers; but it will be many years before anything can be
done here save to cut timber. Then you come to Cathlamet, a village in Washington composed of six houses. Ten miles farther, is the village of Oak Point, with a few houses and a sawmill; here we come to the first oak on the Columbia. After another twelve miles, and fifty-eight miles from the ocean, appears Rainier, a village of twelve houses in the Oregon Territory. Another, St. Helen's, on