and these two are keen, active rivals, to all appearances well matched.  Tacoma occupies near the head of the Sound a site of great natural beauty.  It is the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and calls itself the “City of Destiny.”  Seattle is also charmingly located about twenty miles down the Sound from Tacoma, on Elliott Bay.  It is the terminus of the Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern Railroad, now in process of construction, and calls itself the “Queen City of the Sound” and the “Metropolis of Washington.”  What the populations of these towns number I am not able to say with anything like exactness.  They are probably about the same size and they each claim to have about twenty thousand people; but their figures are so rapidly changing, and so often mixed up with counts that refer to the future that exact measurements of either of these places are about as hard to obtain as measurements of the clouds of a growing storm.  Their edges run back for miles into the woods among the trees and stumps and brush which hide a good many of the houses and the stakes which mark the lots; so that, without being as yet very large towns, they seem to fade away into the distance.

But, though young and loose-jointed, they are fast taking on the forms and manners of old cities, putting on airs, as some would say, like boys in haste to be men.  They are already towns “with all modern improvements, first-class in every particular,” as is said of hotels.  They have electric motors and lights, paved broadways and boulevards, substantial business blocks, schools, churches, factories, and foundries.  The lusty, titanic clang of boiler making may be heard there, and plenty of the languid music of pianos mingling with the babel noises of commerce carried on in a hundred tongues.  The main streets are crowded with bright, wide-awake lawyers, ministers, merchants, agents for everything under the sun; ox drivers and loggers in stiff, gummy overalls; back-slanting dudes, well-tailored and shiny; and fashions and bonnets of every feather and color bloom gayly in the noisy throng and advertise London and Paris.  Vigorous life and strife are to be seen everywhere.  The spirit of progress is in the air.  Still it is hard to realize how much good work is being done here of a kind that makes for civilization—­the enthusiastic, exulting energy displayed in the building of new towns, railroads, and mills, in the opening of mines of coal and iron and the development of natural resources in general.  To many, especially in the Atlantic States, Washington is hardly known at all.  It is regarded as being yet a far wild west—­a dim, nebulous expanse of woods—­by those who do not know that railroads and steamers have brought the country out of the wilderness and abolished the old distances.  It is now near to all the world and is in possession of a share of the best of all that civilization has to offer, while on some of the lines of advancement it is at the front.