making her spouse a pair of waterproof
boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up. If there is one
little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her,
and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways. Either she
must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word,
or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker.
We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was
no recrimination. No word was spoken on either side, the exacting
husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.

With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin. Her
tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a
repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden
dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs. The whole performance
was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.

If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo
foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many
surprises would await her. Instead of asking for references from her
last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her
teeth. In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as
important a factor as your hands. The reporter for the funeral column of
an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of
speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little
ones, would call pathetic attention to, "the tired and patient teeth
worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household." A young
wife's cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that
shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the
seagull and chew these into shape. You see, after the boots are wet
each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with
oil and chewed into shape. We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at
this wifely duty. Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands,
incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way
round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking
like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make.
Solomon's eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70 deg.
North would read, "She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh
willingly with her hands; she riseth also