On her first visit to Sitka the author spent a week at Victoria, Vancouver’s Island, a place which she describes as a veritable paradise.  The drives about the town, she says, along the island shores, and through the woods, are beautiful, and the heavy, London-built carriages roll over hard and perfect English highways.  Ferns were growing ten and twelve feet high by the roadside.  Wild rose-bushes are matted together by the acre in the clearings about the town, and in June they weight the air with their perfume, as they did a century ago, when Marchand, the old French voyager, compared the region to the rose-covered slopes of Bulgaria.  The honeysuckle attains the greatest perfection in this climate, and covers and smothers the cottages and trellises with thickly-set blossoms.  Even the currant-bushes grow to unusual height, and in many gardens they are trained on arbors and hang their red, ripe clusters high overhead.

The old Russian town of Sitka, the most northern on the Pacific coast, she describes as a straggling, peaceful sort of town, edging along shore at the foot of high mountains, and sheltered from the surge and turmoil of the ocean by a sea-wall of rocky, pine-covered islands.  The moss has grown greener and thicker on the roofs of the solid old wooden houses that are relics of Russian days, the paint has worn thinner everywhere, and a few more houses tumbling into ruins complete the scenes of picturesque decay.  Twenty years ago there were one hundred and twenty-five buildings in the town proper, and it is doubtful if a dozen have been erected since.

Miss Scidmore’s descriptions of the various places she visited and the curious things she saw are vivid and picturesque, and one can learn more of both from her pages than from all the official reports that have been published.  It is a book that ought to have a wide popularity.  It is well illustrated and contains a map reduced from the last general chart of Alaska published by the Coast Survey.

BOY LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES NAVY.  By a Naval Officer.  Boston:  D. Lothrop & Co.  Price $1.25.  It is difficult to write a book of boy’s adventures without falling into what is popularly called sensational writing, that is the description of improbable incidents to arouse and excite the imagination without any purpose beyond that result.  The writer of the present volume, while making an intensely interesting story, has avoided this danger, and his narrative gives a not overdrawn description of the life of a boy on a vessel in the United States Navy.  Joe Bently is the son of a Maine farmer, with a strong distaste for the life to which he has been brought up and an equally strong love for the sea.  His desire to become a sailor has always been repressed by his father, who, though loving his son, has no sympathy with him in this one respect.