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Rh bluffs about Port Townsend. Even the city of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, enjoys this exemption from surplus moisture, which at the mouth of the Strait is excessive. The superior mildness of the climate of this locality and the archipelago still farther north is to be attributed to the warmed water of the gulf-stream which flows inland with the tides, warming the air above it.

Port Townsend has a population of about seven thousand, a good part of which has been gained in the two years just passed. The recent sudden impulse given to the growth of the city was the effect of the inception of the Port Townsend and Southern Railroad, a local enterprise which was to connect it with Portland, and thus with two transcontinental roads from there, as well as with the Northern Pacific somewhere south of Olympia, which would give it a third overland route. The enterprise was soon taken in hand by the Oregon Improvement Company, a syndicate which is closely allied to the Union Pacific and the leased Oregon Railway and Navigation Companies.

Over one million dollars was expended in 1889 in the construction of new business buildings. The government also began work on a new custom-house, to cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A fine hotel, the "Eisenbeis," was erected, three miles of street railway built, a company formed to supply the city with water, and several new manufactories started. Besides all this, half a dozen "additions" were made to the old town. Truly, the power of railroads, or even the prospect of one, to give life to business, is marvellous.

Besides the lumber-mills before mentioned as being in the vicinity of Port Townsend, there are the Puget Sound Iron-Works at Chimacum, or Irondale, near the head of the bay, which turned out in 1889 three hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of pig-iron, employing in the mines, the woods, and the works six hundred men.

The rival, but hitherto an unsuccessful one, of Port Townsend is Port Angeles, on the south shore of Fuca Strait, and west about thirty miles. It has a good harbor, and there is no natural reason why it should not be the port of entry instead of Townsend. When, in 1861, Victor Smith was appointed