The upper story of Port Townsend is charmingly located, wide bright waters on one side, flowing evergreen woods on the other.  The streets are well laid out and well tended, and the houses, with their luxuriant gardens about them, have an air of taste and refinement seldom found in towns set on the edge of a wild forest.  The people seem to have come here to make true homes, attracted by the beauty and fresh breezy healthfulness of the place as well as by business advantages, trusting to natural growth and advancement instead of restless “booming” methods.  They perhaps have caught some of the spirit of calm moderation and enjoyment from their English neighbors across the water.  Of late, however, this sober tranquillity has begun to give way, some whiffs from the whirlwind of real estate speculation up the Sound having at length touched the town and ruffled the surface of its calmness.

A few miles up the bay is Fort Townsend, which makes a pretty picture with the green woods rising back of it and the calm water in front.  Across the mouth of the Sound lies the long, narrow Whidbey Island, named by Vancouver for one of his lieutenants.  It is about thirty miles in length, and is remarkable in this region of crowded forests and mountains as being comparatively open and low.  The soil is good and easily worked, and a considerable portion of the island has been under cultivation for many years.  Fertile fields, open, parklike groves of oak, and thick masses of evergreens succeed one another in charming combinations to make this “the garden spot of the Territory.”

Leaving Port Townsend for Seattle and Tacoma, we enter the Sound and sail down into the heart of the green, aspiring forests, and find, look where we may, beauty ever changing, in lavish profusion.  Puget Sound, “the Mediterranean of America” as it is sometimes called, is in many respects one of the most remarkable bodies of water in the world.  Vancouver, who came here nearly a hundred years ago and made a careful survey of it, named the larger northern portion of it “Admiralty Inlet” and one of the long, narrow branches “Hood’s Canal’” applying the name “Puget Sound” only to the comparatively small southern portion.  The latter name, however, is now applied generally to the entire inlet, and is commonly shortened by the people hereabouts to “The Sound.”  The natural wealth and commercial advantages of the Sound region were quickly recognized, and the cause of the activity prevailing here is not far to seek.  Vancouver, long before civilization touched these shores, spoke of it in terms of unstinted praise.  He was sent out by the British government with the principal object in view of “acquiring accurate knowledge as to the nature and extent of any water communication which may tend in any considerable degree to facilitate an intercourse for the purposes of commerce between the northwest coast and the country on the opposite side of the continent,” vague traditions having long been current concerning a strait supposed to unite the two oceans.  Vancouver reported that he found the coast from San Francisco to Oregon and beyond to present a nearly straight solid barrier to the sea, without openings, and we may well guess the joy of the old navigator on the discovery of these waters after so long and barren a search to the southward.