ith no more interval than cooking and
eating required. In the largest tent of the encampment, packed full of
men and women, the children wedged in where they could get, myself
seated on a pile of robes and skins, my interpreters at my side, my
hearers squatted on the spruce boughs of the floor, the instruction went
on. As it proceeded, the interpretation improved, though it was still
difficult and clumsy, as speaking through two minds and two mouths must
always be. Whenever I stopped there was urgent request to go on, until
at last my voice was almost gone with incessant use. Over and over the
same things I went; the cardinal facts of religion--the Incarnation, the
Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension; the cardinal laws of
morality--the prohibition of murder, adultery, theft, and falsehood;
that something definite might be left behind that should not be lost in
the vagueness of general recollection, and always with the insistence
that this was God's world and not the devil's world, a world in which
good should ultimately prevail in spite of all opposition.

[Sidenote: SAVAGE, HEATHEN, PAGAN]

It is at once a high privilege and a solemn responsibility to deal with
souls to whom the appeal of the Christian religion had never before been
made, as were most of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One
never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage" and "heathen"
and "pagan" all meant, of course, in their origin, just country people,
and point to some old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the
city-bred, long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places as
Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a forest dweller, a
heathen a heath dweller, and for a large part of each year I come,
etymologically, within the terms myself. But with its ordinary
implication of ferocity and bloodthirstiness it is absurd to apply the
word "savage" to the mild and gentle Alaskan Indian, and, with its
ordinary implication of bowing down to wood and stone, it is misleading
to apply the term "heathen" to those who never made any sort of graven
image.

Much has been written, and cleverly written, about the Alaskan Indian
that is preposterously untrue. Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently
been reading a story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the
vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and his indignation at
the representation of his people in this story was amusing. The story
was called