“It seemed a long slumber to him, but at last he woke.  He was upon the very spot whence he started at morning.  He felt hungry, and made a hearty breakfast of the chestnut-like bulbs of the kamas root, and took a smoke.  Reflecting on the events of yesterday, he became aware of an odd change in his condition.  He was not bruised and wounded, as he expected, but very stiff only, and his joints creaked like the creak of a lazy paddle on the rim of a canoe.  His hair was matted and reached a yard down his back.  ‘Tamanous,’ thought the old man.  But chiefly he was conscious of a mental change.  He was calm and content.  Hiaqua and wealth seemed to have lost their charm for him.  Tacoma, shining like gold and silver and precious stones of gayest lustre, seemed a benign comrade and friend.  All the outer world was cheerful, and he thought he had never wakened to a fresher morning.  He rose and started on his downward way, but the woods seemed strangely transformed since yesterday; just before sunset he came to the prairie where his lodge used to be; he saw an old squaw near the door crooning a song; she was decked with many strings of hiaqua and costly beads.  It was his wife; and she told him he had been gone many, many years—­she could not tell how many; that she had remained faithful and constant to him, and distracted her mind from the bitterness of sorrow by trading in kamas and magic herbs, and had thus acquired a genteel competence.  But little cared the sage for such things; he, was rejoiced to be at home and at peace, and near his own early gains of hiaqua and treasure buried in a place of security.  He imparted whatever he possessed—­material treasures or stores of wisdom and experience—­freely to all the land.  Every dweller came to him for advice how to spear the salmon, chase the elk, or propitiate Tamanous.  He became the great medicine man of the Siwashes and a benefactor to his tribe and race.  Within a year after he came down from his long nap on the side of Tacoma, a child, my father, was born to him.  The sage lived many years, revered and beloved, and on his death-bed told this history to my father as a lesson and a warning.  My father dying, told it to me.  But I, alas! have no son; I grow old, and lest this wisdom perish from the earth, and Tamanous be again obliged to interpose against avarice, I tell the tale to thee, O Boston tyee.  Mayst thou and thy nation not disdain this lesson of an earlier age, but profit by it and be wise!”

So far the Siwash recounted his legend without the palisades of Fort Nisqually, and motioning, in expressive pantomime, at the close, that he was dry with big talk and would gladly “wet his whistle.”

The town of Tacoma contains about 15,000 inhabitants, and is in a highly prosperous condition.  From here one may start on the grand Alaskan tour, winding up through all the wonders of sound and strait, bay and ocean, to the far North summerland—­a trip of most entrancing interest.  The return from Tacoma to Portland may be made by either rail or boat.