Seven Years on the Pacific Slope
Mrs Hugh Fraser
Paperback
(TheClassics.us, Sept. 12, 2013)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... ii the far west at close range Fate takes up my challenge--The "dashing adventurer"--Travelling through forest fires--Silence, the first lesson of the West--A steamerette on the Columbia--Snags, Cliffs, and Rapids--The mail bag and the mail carrier--I "hit" the hotel--"Farewell, beloved umbrella! "--Rivers in flood--Sixty miles of stage over switchback trails--A tight place--The pious brigand--Mother and Son--The shanty on the hill--A lonely night--My landlady and her philosophy--A bachelor's cabin--His menu--A prosperous invalid--My study in the hay loft--Summer gold and Winter splendours. fate has a startling way of taking one at one's word--or a part of it--sometimes. I remember that, some nine or ten years ago, I was playing round in New York, very much pleased with myself, and things in general, when I received a letter from my eldest son, begging me to return to England, and describing, very charmingly, I must say, the delights of English rural life. In spite of published dates--and photographs--I was feeling at the time about twenty-five years old, and I replied by saying that I should die of boredom in the country in England, and by giving a list of the different homes I meant to have in the States, ending up with "a shanty on the Pacific Slope." Not very long after I flung out that defiance I found the last item of it realised. Purely by accident, and much to my own surprise, the shanty had become my home; and a very real and interesting home too. Hughie always calls me "The Summer One," because my first sight of the far Northwest was granted in the scorching days of August, and was so different to his first experiences that it is worth describing, if only for the sake of the contrast. I had come over from Japan in the Saikyo...