s.

But it was not always so that we had to stay in the snow-house. Once in
a while father would come in and say it was not so cold as usual, and
then we would have a chance to look round outside the snow-house. We
never took a long walk. As nearly as I can remember, my father's house
was on a low plain near the sea-shore. It sloped gently inland, and we
could have seen a great way into the back country if it had not been for
the great snowdrifts and masses of ice. There were some steep, jagged
rocks in sight of our village, and during the long daytime enough of the
snow would melt off to leave the rocks bare in a few places. On these
bare spots we would find a kind of brown moss, which we gathered and
dried to light our fires with.

We never saw anything green in Greenland, and I never could understand
why they called it by that name.

When we looked out toward the ocean, we could not see very far, for even
in the warmest season there was only a small space of open water, and
beyond that the ice was all piled up in rough, broken masses.

The great event in our family life, however, was the dog-sleigh ride.
When father told us we could go, we came as near dancing and clapping
our hands for joy as Esquimaux children ever did. But we did not have a
fine cutter, with large horses and chiming bells. We did not even have
an old-fashioned bobsled, in which young men and young women have such
good times in your country.

Sometimes the sleigh would be made of a great wide piece of bone from
the jaws of a whale, one end of which turned up like a runner. But more
often it would be either a skin of some animal laid flat on the ground,
or a great frozen fish cut in two at the back and then turned right
over. I never saw such a fish in this country, or in Iceland, so I
cannot tell what kind of fish it was.

Our sleigh was drawn by dogs--sometimes six and sometimes ten or twelve.
Each dog had a collar round his neck and a strip of reindeer hide tied
into the collar and to the sleigh. When the dogs were well broken, they
did not need any lines to guide them; but if they were not well trained,
they had to have lines to control them. While we were getting ready to
start, the dogs would jump about and whine and be as anxious to go as
fiery horses in this country. The trained dogs would run forward and put
their noses right into their collars without any trouble. When all was
ready, away we went! It was great fun! The dogs could car