not press
the matter, however, nor in any manner violate the _role_ of cold
courtesy which he had assumed; and it was chiefly by the sudden check
and falling of the countenance, when he found us thorough Unionist, that
his sympathies were betrayed. Wine and rusks were brought in, both
delicious,--the latter seeming like ambrosia, after the dough
cannon-balls with which our "head cook at the Tremont House" had regaled
us. After a stay of civil brevity we took our leave, and so closed an
interview in which we had been treated with irreproachable politeness,
but in which the heart was forbidden to have any share.

First the missionaries; now the natives. The squat and squalid huts,
stuck down upon the earth without any pretence of raised foundation, and
jumbled together, corner to side, back to front, any way, as if some
wind had blown them there, did not improve on acquaintance. The walls,
five feet high, were built of poles some five inches in diameter; the
low roof, made of similar poles, was heavily heaped with earth. What
with this deep earth-covering, and with their grovelling toward the
earth in such a flat and neighborly fashion, they had a dreadfully
under-foot look, and seemed rather dens than houses. Many were ragged
and rotten, all inconceivably cheerless. No outhouses, no inclosures, no
vegetation, no relief of any kind. About and between them the swardless
ground is all trodden into mud. Prick-eared Esquimaux dogs huddle,
sneak, bark, and snarl around, with a free fight now and then, in which
they all fall upon the one that is getting the worst of it. Before the
principal group of huts, in the open space between them and the mansion,
a dead dog lies rotting; children lounge listlessly, and babies toddle
through the slutch about it. Here and there a full-grown Esquimaux, in
greasy and uncouth garb, loiters, doing nothing, _looking_ nothing.

I, for one, was completely overcrowed by the impression of a bare and
aimless existence, and could not even wonder. Christian Hopedale! "Leave
all hope, ye that enter here!"

At 5 P. M. the chapel-bell rings, and at once the huts swarm. We follow
the crowd. They enter the chapel by a door at the end nearest their
dens, and seat themselves, the women at the farther, the men at the
hither extreme, all facing a raised desk at the middle of one side.
Behind them, opposite this pulpit, is an organ. Presently, from a door
at the farther end, the missionaries file in, some twe