large, ill-formed heads, hair like meadow hay, and very scanty beards.
Such is a pen portrait of a people who once ruled the whole of
Scandinavia. A short trip inland brings us to the summer encampment of
the Lapps, formed of a few rude huts, outside of which they live except
in the winter months. A Lapp sleeps wherever fatigue overcomes him,
preferring the ground, but often lying on the snow. They are a wandering
race, their wealth consisting solely in their herds of reindeer, to
procure sustenance for which necessitates frequent changes of locality.
A Laplander is rich provided he owns enough of these animals to support
himself and family. A herd that can afford thirty full-grown deer
annually for slaughter, and say ten more to be sold or bartered, makes a
family of a dozen persons comfortably well off. Some are destroyed every
year by wolves and bears, notwithstanding all the precautions taken to
prevent it, while in severe winters a large number are sure to die of
starvation.

The herds live almost entirely on the so-called reindeer moss, but this
failing them, they eat the young twigs of the trees. When the snow
covers the ground to a depth of not more than three or four feet, these
intelligent creatures dig holes in it so as to reach the moss, and
guided by instinct they rarely fail to do so in just the right place.
The Lapps themselves would be entirely at a loss for any indication as
to where this food should be sought when covered by the deep snow. The
reindeer will carry, lashed to its back, a hundred and thirty pounds, or
drag upon the snow, when harnessed to a sledge, two hundred and fifty
pounds, travelling ten miles an hour for several consecutive hours,
without apparent fatigue. The country over which these people roam is
included in Northern Norway and Sweden, with a portion of Northwestern
Russia and Finland, extending over about seven thousand square miles,
but the whole race will hardly number thirty thousand. Lapland, in
general terms, may be said to be the region lying between the Polar
Ocean and the Arctic Circle, the eastern and western boundaries being
the Atlantic Ocean and the White Sea, two-thirds of which territory
belongs to Russia, and one-third is about equally divided between Norway
and Sweden.

In the winter season the Lapps retire far inland, where they build
temporary huts of the branches of the trees, plastered with clay and
banked up with snow, leaving a hole at the top as a chimne