Along Washington's coastline, from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Columbia River, "only the 43 miles between the Ozette River and the Hoh remain unshadowed by a road and still bordered by unspoiled forest land. Yet, in the entire country, this is the biggest such stretch we have left." The speaker: William O. Douglas, 59, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the nation's foremost man scout. Occasion: a three-day hike from Lake Ozette to Lapush, paced by the Justice--leading his wife, daughter, twelve newsmen and 55 Boone companions--in demonstration against local outcries for a tourist-drawing coastal highway. "Can we afford to lose the last such place where a person can get away from it all and savor what is true to nature as it was thousands of years ago?" Mr. Justice Douglas asked the group, and those who had not been convinced at the outset admitted that they had been converted to "the wilderness concept." Not until the end did the opposition show up: Larry Venable, a Port Angeles freight-service company executive, greeted the hikers with signs that Said, SUPER HIGHWAYS FOR 47 STATES BUT PRIMITIVE AREAS FOR us, and, less subjectively, BIRD WATCHER GO HOME. Douglas tipped back his battered hat, hitched up his shapeless pants, said: "Sorry you couldn't be with us on the hike."

Middle Eastern crises come and go, but sheiks must eat--and His Highness, Sheik Sir Abdullah as Salim as Sabah of Kuwait sometimes has prodigious company with his meals. On his oil-born annual income of $260 million, the number of guests he could see around him at a given dinner party is limited only by the geographical horizon. But even so, sheiks do have to pare their invitation lists, which explains why Abdullah of Kuwait has ordered--from West Germany's Vereinigte Werkstaetten furniture makers--only 200 straight-backed, 14-carat, gold-plated dining-room chairs.

Wearing new holes in his shoes, Adlai Stevenson marched west across Europe, stopped to lunch with 93-year-old Art Historian Bernard Berenson at a villa some 20 miles from Florence. In coffee-time seclusion the avowed future candidate for nothing and the acknowledged past master of art criticism swapped ideas on such world problems as U.S. v. Soviet education, American politics, Russia's practical advantage over the U.S. in not being bound to moral and political standards. "We must create respect for excellence," said Stevenson. Berenson agreed, suggested the stirring rallying cry: "Intellectuals of the world, unite!"

Last week, ten years after Eduard Benes unhappily yielded Czechoslovakia to Communist control, the late President's nephew, Bohus Benes, became a U.S. citizen. Czech consul general in San Francisco from 1942 to 1948, Bohus Benes is now a part-time lecturer in political science. Coldly straightforward about the significance of his oath to the U.S., he said: "This means that I've given up hope that my country will ever be liberated."

In the morning mail at the Chesterfield and District branch of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was a note from Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, eleventh Duke of Devonshire. Resolving a difficult moral problem, the duke wrote: "In view of the society's attitude in supporting the bill to abolish stag hunting, I feel I must tender my resignation as president of the branch." Forced to his choice by an approaching parliamentary debate on the hunting of deer with hounds, the 38-year-old duke--whose coat of arms sports "three bucks' heads cabossed argent"--later went off for a bit of conscience-clear grouse shooting with his uncle, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Prince Aly Khan, 47, has scrupulously avoided tabloid publicity since becoming Pakistan's permanent delegate to the United Nations last winter. Returned from London and meetings of the Baghdad Pact nations, the newly staid playboy of the Eastern world delivered his maiden speech to the General Assembly, endorsed the British and American moves in Lebanon and Jordan. "As I see it," he added, "the main issue is whether, after years of foreign domination, the weaker nations who have but recently achieved their independence shall lose it once again to new forms of political colonialism." Coming out of his debut jitters, he asked a congratulator: "Was it desperate?"

Applying body-Englisch to the Italian bowling game of bocce, West Germany's trim, fit-looking Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, 82, helped roll away a four-week holiday beside Italy's Lake Como.

With his wife, the U.S. Congress and Dwight D. Eisenhower acting severally to redress his hurt feelings, Rear Admiral Hyman G. Rickover was the most unforgotten man in Washington. Following Ruth Rickover's soundings after the admiral was not invited to the White House reception honoring the submarine Nautilus' North Pole transit (TIME, Aug. 25), the President named Rickover his personal representative at the nuclear sub's homecoming in Manhattan this week. Congress unanimously voted to have a gold medal--approximately the distinction accorded Charles A. Lindbergh for his 1927 flight across the Atlantic--struck by the Treasury and awarded to Rickover for "successfully directing the development and construction of the world's first nuclear-powered ships . . ." The 89,000-member Army and Navy Union, oldest national veterans' organization in the U.S., made him the third recipient of the Union's Medal of Honor. (The others: General John J. Pershing, General Eisenhower. ) And at the wardroom tables of top Navy brass, leftover crow was the plat du jour. Rickover, a sort of underwater Billy Mitchell, long a personal and professional abrasive to the membership committee of the Navy's highest club, had not been a favorite candidate for promotion. Last week, baking in the heat from Capitol Hill, Navy Secretary Thomas S. Gates gave the Navy's word that a vice admiral's billet will be found for Hyman Rickover.

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