for several years, drinking bay rum and bear's
oil and having a good time. He wore fur underclothes all the time,
winter and summer, and evaded the poll-tax for a long time. Erik also
established a settlement on the south-east coast of Greenland in about
latitude 60 degrees north. These people remained here for some time,
subsisting on shrimp salad, sea-moss farina, and neat's-foot oil. But
finally they became so bored with the quiet country life and the
backward springs that they removed from there to a land that is fairer
than day, to use the words of another. They removed during the holidays,
leaving their axle grease and all they held dear, including their
remains.

From that on down to 1380 we hear or read varying and disconnected
accounts of people who have been up that way, acquired a large red
chilblain, made an observation, and died. Representatives from almost
every quarter of the globe have been to the far north, eaten their
little hunch of jerked polar-bear, and then the polar-bear has eaten his
little hunch of jerked explorer, and so the good work went on.

The polar bear, with his wonderful retentive faculties, has succeeded in
retaining his great secret regarding the pole, together with the man who
came out there to find out about it. So up to 1380 a large number of
nameless explorers went to this celebrated watering-place, shot a few
pemmican, ate a jerked whale, shuddered a couple of times, and died. It
has been the history of arctic exploration from the earliest ages. Men
have taken their lives and a few doughnuts in their hands, wandered away
into the uncertain light of the frozen north, made a few
observations--to each other regarding the backward spring--and then
cached their skeletons forever.

In 1380 two Italians named Lem took a load of sun-kissed bananas and
made a voyage to the extreme north, but the historian says that the
accounts are so conflicting, and as the stories told by the two brothers
did not agree and neither ever told it the same on two separate
occasions, the history of their voyage is not used very much.

Years rolled on, boys continued to go to school and see in their
geographies enticing pictures of men in expensive fur clothing running
sharp iron spears and long dangerous stab knives into ferocious white
bears and snorting around on large cakes of cold ice and having a good
time. These inspired the growing youth to rise up and do likewise. So
every nation 'neath the sun h