eir
ball-play with the heads of the walruses,' they thought in their
superstition, and they turned their whole attention to the song and
dance. In the midst of the circle, and divested of his furry cloak,
stood a Greenlander, with a small pipe, and he played and sang a song
about catching the seal, and the chorus around chimed in with, '_Eia,
Eia, Ah._' And in their white furs they danced about in the circle,
till you might fancy it was a polar bear's ball.

"And now a Court of Judgment was opened. Those Greenlanders who had
quarrelled stepped forward, and the offended person chanted forth the
faults of his adversary in an extempore song, turning them sharply
into ridicule, to the sound of the pipe and the measure of the dance.
The defendant replied with satire as keen, while the audience laughed,
and gave their verdict. The rocks heaved, the glaciers melted, and
great masses of ice and snow came crashing down, shivering to
fragments as they fell: it was a glorious Greenland summer night. A
hundred paces away, under the open tent of hides, lay a sick man. Life
still flowed through his warm blood, but still he was to die--he
himself felt it, and all who stood round him knew it also; therefore
his wife was already sowing round him the shroud of furs, that she
might not afterwards be obliged to touch the dead body. And she asked,
'Wilt thou be buried on the rock, in the firm snow? I will deck the
spot with thy _kayak_, and thy arrows, and the _angekokk_ shall dance
over it. Or wouldst thou rather be buried in the sea?' 'In the sea,'
he whispered, and nodded with a mournful smile. 'Yes, it is a pleasant
summer tent, the sea,' observed the wife. 'Thousands of seals sport
there, the walrus shall lie at thy feet, and the hunt will be safe and
merry!' And the yelling children tore the outspread hide from the
window-hole, that the dead man might be carried to the ocean, the
billowy ocean, that had given him food in life, and that now, in
death, was to afford him a place of rest. For his monument, he had the
floating, ever-changing icebergs, whereon the seal sleeps, while the
storm bird flies round their gleaming summits!"

TENTH EVENING.

[Illustration: THE OLD MAID.]

"I knew an old maid," said the Moon. "Every winter she wore a wrapper
of yellow satin, and it always remained new, and was the only fashion
she followed. In summer she always wore the same straw hat, and I
verily believe the very same grey-blue dress.

"S