look on the
great salt lake from the hummocks? The sun has been hot a long time
now. The ice-cliffs are dangerous. Their edges split off every day.
If my son goes often to them, he will one day come tumbling down upon
the floes and be crushed flat, and men will carry him to his mother's
feet like a mass of shapeless blubber."

It is interesting to note how strong a resemblance there is in sentiment
and modes of thought between different members of the human family.
This untutored savage, this Polar giant, replied, in the Eskimo tongue,
words which may be freely translated--"Never fear, mother, I know how to
take care of myself."

Had he been an Englishman, he could not have expressed himself more
naturally. He smiled as he looked down at his stout and genial mother,
while she stooped and drew forth a choice morsel of walrus flesh from
one of her boots. Eskimo ladies wear enormous sealskin boots the whole
length of their legs. The tops of these boots are made extremely wide,
for the purpose of stowing away blubber, or babies, or other odd
articles that might encumber their hands.

Chingatok seemed the personification of savage dignity as he stood
there, leaning on a short walrus spear. Evidently his little mother
doted on him. So did Oblooria, a pretty little girl of about sixteen,
who was his only sister, and the counterpart of her mother, hairy coat
and tail included, only a few sizes smaller.

But Chingatok's dignity was marred somewhat when he went down on his
hands and knees, in order to crawl through the low snow-tunnel which was
the only mode of egress from the snow-hut.

Emerging at the outer end of the tunnel, he stood up, drew the hood of
his sealskin coat over his head, shouldered his spear, and went off with
huge and rapid strides over the frozen billows of the Arctic Sea.

Spring was far advanced at the time of which we write, and the sun shone
not only with dazzling brilliancy, but with intense power on the fields
of ice which still held the ocean in their cold unyielding embrace. The
previous winter had been unusually severe, and the ice showed little or
no sign of breaking up, except at a great distance from land, where the
heaving of the waves had cracked it up into large fields. These were
gradually parting from the main body, and drifting away with
surface-currents to southern waters, there to be liquefied and re-united
to their parent sea.

The particular part of the Greenland coast