trikes them,
and is dashed to pieces. Sometimes it gets between two of these
ice-hills, and gets crushed, as if it was a little boat. Then the men
in the ship have to get out, and jump upon one of the ice-hills. But
they are pretty likely to be frozen to death then.

[Illustration: The Indians.]

THE INDIANS.

In that cold country I saw some Indians. They were dressed in skins.
I never saw such dirty-looking men and women before in all my life,
and I have never seen any such since. They had never seen a ship
before, I should think. I thought they did not know much more than
the white bears. Why, they would sell almost all the clothes they had
on, if we would give them a few pieces of glass, or a nail or two.
One of the women who came to the ship had a little girl about four
years old, and she said she would give us that girl, if we would let
her have a tin pan which she saw.

These Indians tie their children on their backs, when they have to
walk a great way. They licked the oil on the outside of our lamps,
just as a dog or a cat would have done. Oh, what dirty people! They
eat their meat raw. We killed a seal one day, and our captain gave it
to one of the young women. She took it, and bit it into pieces with
her teeth. Then she passed it round to the rest of the Indians, and
they all helped eat it.

[Illustration]

THE WHITE BEARS.

There are a great many white bears in that country. Sometimes you can
see two or three of them sitting on one of these ice-hills. How they
ever got there, I am sure I cannot tell. I guess they went out on the
ice only a little way from the shore, to get something which they saw
was good to eat; and while they were on the ice, it started off, and
they could not get to the shore again.

One of the men who sailed in the same ship with me, told me a story
about a white bear, which made me laugh for an hour after I heard it.
He said he was in a small boat with another sailor once, about a mile
away from the ship. I forget what they went out in the boat for, but I
suppose the captain of the ship sent them out for something. They were
rowing along in the boat, and they came close to an iceberg. They saw
something alive on the iceberg, but they could not make out what it
was: they did not know but it was a man. But they came a little nearer
to the great ice-hill, and they soon found out what sort of a thing
there was on it. _Splash_ something went into the water; and in a