months.

People who live "inside" of Alaska do not live exactly as they might
were they in New England. Conventions for the most part disappear.
Life is a struggle for existence and a bit of pleasure now and again.
If conventions and customs get in the way of these, away with them.
And no one in his right senses can blame these people for living that
way.

One question we meet, and probably it should be answered. Would two
lone girls do and dare the things that Lucile and Marian did? My only
answer must be that girls of their age--girls from "outside" at
that--have done them.

Helen C----, a sixteen-year-old girl, came to Cape Prince of Wales to
keep house for her father, who was superintendent of the reindeer herd
at that point. She lived there with her father and the natives--no
white woman about--for two years. During that time her father often
went to the herd, which was grazing some forty miles from the Cape, and
stayed for a week or two at a time, marking deer or cutting them out to
send to market. Helen stayed at the Cape with the natives. At times,
in the spring, unattended by her father, she went walrus hunting with
the natives in their thirty-foot, sailing skin-boat and stayed out with
them for thirty hours at a time, going ten or twelve miles from land
and sailing into the very midst of a school of five hundred or more of
walrus. This, of course, was not necessary; just a part of the fun a
healthy girl has when she lives in an Eskimo village.

Beth N----, a girl of nineteen, came to keep house for her brother, the
government teacher on Shishmaref Island--a small, sandy island off the
shore of Alaska, some seventy-five miles above Cape Prince of Wales.
She had not been with her brother long when a sailing schooner anchored
off shore. This schooner had on board their winter supply of food.
Her brother went on board to superintend the unloading. The work had
scarcely begun when a sudden storm tore the schooner from her moorings
and sent her whirling southward through the straits.

For some ten or twelve days Beth was on that barren, sandy island
entirely alone. The natives were, at this time of the year, off
fishing up one of the rivers of the mainland. She did not have as much
as a match to light a fire. She had no sort of notion as to how or
when her brother would return. The fact of the matter was that had not
her brother had in his possession a note from the captain asking him to
come aboa