side the fish-stories we are familiar
with, who would seek to change the heathen?

Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of
each other for better or for worse. It is an easy union entered upon and
maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one
manifest advantage,--Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When
unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of
the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes
herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium
attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam
husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young
Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways. She
asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, "No. You may go
to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction,
and I hunt." Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e.,
the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six
nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father,
for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the
ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was
strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a
tree handy he would have been lynched. This would have been the first
lynching recorded in Canada. The feeling of the Eskimo community was
that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the
bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper
state to her father's door or to let her have the dogs.

In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in
re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical
ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores. The ceremonies which
approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the
importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of
what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them
grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out
each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a
freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony,
replied, "New light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was
yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to
igloo reminds us of the "first-footing" of the Scottish