a quarter of a million. Furniture and house-furnishing goods may be purchased wholesale in Tacoma, and of every description, from the most elegant to the plainest, from two or three furniture companies.
The Tacoma Trading Company deals in building-material, coal, hay, grain, and lime, has a capital of fifty thousand dollars, and sells three hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of goods to dealers in Washington and British Columbia. The YakimaTacoma Trading Company is in the same business. When I say that drugs, liquors, books, boots and shoes, leather, carriages, and dressed meats for logging-camps are sold wholesale in this young city, I have nearly covered the ground occupied by jobbers in any city; and I have perhaps wearied the reader to show him how these western towns commence life,—near the top of the ladder, instead of at the bottom.
Let us now take a ride to old Tacoma, and explore a little .further into the already almost forgotten beginnings of things. This is a really pretty site for a settlement, being near the water's edge, with a view of the bay in front, and sheltering hills at the back. It has a rural air quite in contrast to the ambitious look of the newer city. I have the curiosity to call on Mrs. McCarver, who occupies a modest home in the place where her husband died. We talk a little about him, and what local historians have said of him, and then I go to see the famous belltower of St. Peter's little pioneer church round the corner. The church is plain to dreariness, and the tower is simply a cedartree sawed off fifty feet from the ground and wreathed around with ivy. A bell is hung above it in a frame-work, which is topped with a roof like an extinguisher, surmounted by a cross. It is a pretty conceit, and the only object at all picturesque in the sleepy old place.
I breathe more freely when I regain the heights of the new city, and rest my gaze on the roofs of Pacific Avenue where I know brainy men are planning more railroads, a steamship line to China, and other ways to coptrol the trade of the Occident and the Orient. My eyes wander further eastward, over the head of the bay, the Puyallup flats, the Indian reservation, and the distant mountains, to Mount Eainier itself, where they rest
