across the wild
white world. His strength failing, the youth pantingly followed.
Thousands of years passed; the breathless pursuit continued; the
maiden's nebulous hair became shot with streaks of golden fire, from
her eyes beams of light streamed across the expanses over which she
exultantly, fearfully bounded; the tremulous faltering youth's face
paled until it shone silvery in the darkness, and the beads of
perspiration on his forehead glowed with a strange lustre. Reaching,
in their mad race, the very edge of the earth, the maiden leaped,
fiery, into space, and her hair becoming suddenly molten, she became
the sun--the eternal maiden Sukh-eh-nukh, the beautiful, the
all-desired. Utterly exhausted, his wan arms yearningly outstretched,
the youth swooned after her into the heavens, and was transformed into
the moon--the ever-desiring, ever-sorrowing moon. In the smile of
Sukh-eh-nukh the seas melted. Walrus and narwhals, seals and whales
came into being on the bosom of Kokoyah; on the earth the snows
disappeared, and the brow of Tornahhuchsuah was crowned with green
grasses and starry flowers. Men hunted game, women laughed for joy;
they beat drums, they danced, they sang. By the eternal, unrequited
passion of the lovers in the skies, happiness and plenty came upon the
earth. But, with Light, came also Death. Jealous of men's happiness,
Perdlugssuaq, the Great Evil, brought sickness; he struck men on the
hunt, on the seas, in the mountains. He was ever feared. He made the
Great Dark terrible. But when the night became bright with the
love-lorn glamour of the moon, Perdlugssuaq was for the time forgotten;
in their hearts men felt a vague, tender, and ineffable stirring--the
lure of a passion stronger and stranger even than death. They gazed
upon the moon with instinctive, undefined pity. So, as the years
passed, and ages melted and remade the snows, the long day was golden
with the Beauty that is ever desired, the Ideal never attained; the
night was softly silver with the melancholy and eternal hope of the
deathless love that eternally desires, eternally pursues, and is
eternally denied._

Thus runs the Eskimo legend.

I

"_Her cheeks were flushed delicately with the soft pink of the lichen
flowers that bloom in the rare days of early summer. Her eyes played
with a light as elusive, as quick as the golden radiance on the seas._"

Great excitement prevailed among the members of the tribe. Al