, and return with a team of dogs for the meat and the
carcass of a recently-caught seal.

Meanwhile, having removed and packed up the bear-skin, he swung it on
his broad shoulders, and made for the shore as fast as his short legs
would carry him. On the way he came to the spot where the fallen
traveller lay.

His first act was to open his eyes to the uttermost, and, considering
the small, twinkling appearance of those eyes just a minute before, the
change was marvellous.

"Hoi!" then burst from him with tremendous emphasis, after which he
dropped his bundle, turned poor Rooney over on his back, and looked at
his face with an expression of awe.

"Dead!" said the Eskimo, under his breath--in his own tongue, of course,
not in English, of which, we need scarcely add, he knew nothing.

After feeling the man's breast, under his coat, for a few seconds, he
murmured the word "Kablunet" (foreigner), and shook his head mournfully.

It was not so much grief for the man's fate that agitated this child of
the northern wilderness, as regret at his own bad fortune. Marvellous
were the reports which from the south of Greenland had reached him, in
his far northern home, of the strange Kablunets or foreigners who had
arrived there to trade with the Eskimos--men who, so the reports went,
wore smooth coats without hair, little round things on their heads
instead of hoods, and flapping things on their legs instead of sealskin
boots--men who had come in monster kayaks (canoes), as big as icebergs;
men who seemed to possess everything, had the power to do anything, and
feared nothing. No fabrications in the _Arabian Nights_, or _Gulliver_,
or _Baron Munchausen_, ever transcended the stories about those
Kablunets which had reached this broad, short, sturdy Eskimo--stories
which no doubt began in the south of Greenland with a substratum of
truth, but which, in travelling several hundreds of miles northward, had
grown, as a snowball might have grown if rolled the same distance over
the Arctic wastes; with this difference--that whereas the snowball would
have retained its original shape, though not its size, the tales lost
not only their pristine form and size, but became so amazingly distorted
that the original reporters would probably have failed to recognise
them. And now, at last, here was actually a Kablunet--a _real_
foreigner in the body; but not alive! It was extremely disappointing!

Our sturdy Eskimo, however, was not a good