As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of
loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had
never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry
admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he
is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with _after_ the fit of
passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools,
with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their
wise papers on the training of "the child," the Eskimo children we saw
were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense
of the word, more truly "educated" than many of our children are.
Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained
admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern
conditions.

Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint
of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the
family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very
nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the
mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the
fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national
greatness.

CHAPTER XIII

FORT MACPHERSON FOLK

"I have drunk the Sea's good wine,
Was ever step so light as mine,
Was ever heart so gay?
O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee,
For this old joy renewed,
For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued
With sunlight and with sea."

--_A Pagan Hymn_.

On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow
passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the
steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants
is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of
running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial
banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in
the scow may sleep in peace.

At Point Separation, 67 deg. 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the
east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles,
the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden
sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred
miles east and west.

The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It
was here, on the