Notwithstanding the importance claimed for Victoria as a commercial center and the capital of British Columbia, it has a rather young, loose-jointed appearance.  The government buildings and some of the business blocks on the main streets are well built and imposing in bulk and architecture.  These are far less interesting and characteristic, however, than the mansions set in the midst of spacious pleasure grounds and the lovely home cottages embowered in honeysuckle and climbing roses.  One soon discovers that this is no Yankee town.  The English faces and the way that English is spoken alone would tell that; while in business quarters there is a staid dignity and moderation that is very noticeable, and a want of American push and hurrah.  Love of land and of privacy in homes is made manifest in the residences, many of which are built in the middle of fields and orchards or large city blocks, and in the loving care with which these home grounds are planted.  They are very beautiful.  The fineness of the climate, with its copious measure of warm moisture distilling in dew and fog, and gentle, bathing, laving rain, give them a freshness and floweriness that is worth going far to see.

Victoria is noted for its fine drives, and every one who can should either walk or drive around the outskirts of the town, not only for the fine views out over the water but to see the cascades of bloom pouring over the gables of the cottages, and the fresh wild woods with their flowery, fragrant underbrush.  Wild roses abound almost everywhere.  One species, blooming freely along the woodland paths, is from two to three inches in diameter, and more fragrant than any other wild rose I ever saw excepting the sweetbriar.  This rose and three species of spiraea fairly fill the air with fragrance after a shower.  And how brightly then do the red berries of the dogwood shine out from the warm yellow-green of leaves and mosses!

But still more interesting and significant are the glacial phenomena displayed hereabouts.  All this exuberant tree, bush, and herbaceous vegetation, cultivated or wild, is growing upon moraine beds outspread by waters that issued from the ancient glaciers at the time of their recession, and scarcely at all moved or in any way modified by post-glacial agencies.  The town streets and the roads are graded in moraine material, among scratched and grooved rock bosses that are as unweathered and telling as any to be found in the glacier channels of Alaska.  The harbor also is clearly of glacial origin.  The rock islets that rise here and there, forming so marked a feature of the harbor, are unchanged roches moutonnees, and the shores are grooved, scratched, and rounded, and in every way as glacial in all their characteristics as those of a newborn glacial lake.