rs is cut pretty close; after
this period in life it is worn in ragged, unkempt locks. The hands and
feet are shapely, the limbs strong and well-formed. An Eskimo woman is
proportionately smaller than the man, and when young sometimes
good-looking. She has small, tapering hands, and high-instepped feet,
and rarely pierces her lips or disfigures her nose. She lavishes upon
her child or children a wealth of affection, endowing them with all her
ornaments. The hair of the Innuit woman is allowed to grow to its full
length and is gathered up behind into thick braids, or else bound up in
ropes, lashed by copper wire or sinews. She seldom tattoos herself, but
a faint drawing of transverse blue lines upon the chin and cheeks is
usually made by her best friend when she is married."

The reader will probably infer, after reading the foregoing notes, that
there is really very little difference, broadly speaking, between a
Tchuktchi and an Eskimo, and yet the two are as dissimilar in racial
characteristics and customs as a Russian and a Turk. Personal experience
inclines me to regard the Siberian native as immeasurably superior to
his Alaskan neighbours,[67] both from a moral and physical point of
view, for the Eskimo is fully as vicious as the Tchuktchi, who frankly
boasts of his depravity, while the former cloaks it beneath a mantle of
hypocrisy not wholly unconnected with a knowledge of the white man and
his methods. But every cloud has its silver lining, and it is
comforting to think that even this rapacious and dissipated race can
occasionally derive pleasure from the beauties of nature. While
strolling round the settlement one day, I gathered a nosegay of wild
flowers, including a species of yellow poppy, anent which Kingigamoot
cherishes a pretty superstition. This flower blossoms in profusion about
mid June around Cape Prince of Wales, and by the end of July has
withered away. Simultaneously a tiny golden butterfly makes its
appearance for about a fortnight, and also disappears. I was gravely
informed by perhaps the greatest inebriate in the village that the poppy
and the insect bear a similar name, for when the former has bloomed for
a while it develops a pair of wings and flies away to return again the
following summer in the guise of a flower.

[Footnote 67: It is only fair to say that the only Eskimo I met were
those at Kingigamoot, and the enmity of these particular natives to most
white men is by some ascribed to th