or heard, or tasted, or smelt, or felt a spirit. How can I
know anything about it?"

"Do you believe in your own spirit, Okiok?"

"Yes, I must. I cannot help it. I am like other men. When a man dies
there is something gone out of him. It must be his spirit."

"Then you believe in other men's spirits as well as your own spirit,"
said Rooney, "though you have never seen, heard, tasted, smelt, or felt
them?"

For a moment the Eskimo was puzzled. Then suddenly his countenance
brightened.

"But I _have_ felt my own," he cried. "I have felt it moving within me,
so that it made me _act_. My legs and arms and brain would not go into
action if they were dead, if the spirit had gone out of them."

"In the very same way," replied the seaman, "you may _feel_ the Great
Spirit, for your own spirit could not go into action so as to cause your
body to act unless a greater Spirit had given it life. So also we may
feel or understand the Great Spirit when we look at the growing flowers,
and hear the moving winds, and behold the shining stars, and feel the
beating of our own hearts. I'm not much of a wise man, an angekok--
which they would call _scholar_ in my country--but I know enough to
believe that it is only `the fool who has said in his heart, There is no
Great Spirit.'"

"There is something in what you say," returned the Eskimo, as the lines
of unusually intense thought wrinkled his brow; "but for all that you
say, I think there are no torngaks, and that Ujarak is a liar as well as
a fool."

"I agree with you, Okiok, because I think you have good reason for your
disbelief. In the first place, it is well-known that Ujarak is a liar,
but that is not enough, for liar though he be, he _sometimes_ tells the
truth. Then, in the second place, he is an ass--hum! I forgot--you
don't know what an ass is; well, it don't matter, for, in the third
place, he never gave any proof to anybody of what he and his torngak are
said to have seen and done, and, strongest reason of all, this familiar
spirit of his acts unwisely--for what could be more foolish than to
choose out of all the tribe a poor half-witted creature like Ippegoo for
the next angekok?"

A gleaming glance of intelligent humour lighted up Okiok's face as he
said--

"Ujarak is wiser than his torngak in that. He wants to make use of the
poor lad for his own wicked ends. I know not what these are--but I have
my suspicions."

"So have I," broke in Nuna at this