" said Tommy, "and he let me
drive them. I wish I had some goats. I wish Santa Claus would bring me
two goats like Johnny's."

"Which would you rather have? Goats or a cow?" asked his father.

"Goats," said Tommy, promptly.

"I wonder if Johnny would!" laughed his father.

"Father, where is Greenland?" said Tommy, presently.

"A country away up at the North--away up in that direction." His
father pointed far across the cow-pasture, which lay shining in the
evening light. "I must show it to you on the map."

"Is it very cold there?" asked Tommy.

"Very cold in winter."

"Colder than this?"

"Oh, yes, because it is so far north that the sun never gets up in
winter to warm it, and away up there the winter is just one long night
and the summer one long day."

"Why, that's where Santa Claus comes from," said Tommy. "Do people
live up there?"

"People called Eskimos," said his father, "who live by fishing and
hunting."

"Tell me about them," said Tommy. "What do they hunt?"

"Bears," said his father, "polar bears--and walrus--and seals--and----"

"Oh, tell me about them," said Tommy, eagerly.

So, as they walked along, his father told him of the strange little,
flat-faced people, who live all winter in houses made of ice and snow
and hunted on the ice-floes for polar bears and seals and walrus, and
in the summer got in their little kiaks and paddled around, hunting
for seals and walrus with their arrows and harpoons, on the "pans" or
smooth ice, where every family of "harps" or seals have their own
private door, gnawed down through the ice with their teeth.

"I wish I could go there," said Tommy, his eyes gazing across the
long, white glistening fields with the dark border of the woodland
beyond and the rich saffron of the winter sky above the tree-tops
stretching across in a border below the steelly white of the upper
heavens.

"What would you do?" asked his father.

"Hunt polar bears," said Tommy promptly. "I'd get one most as big as
the library, so mother could give you the skin; because I heard her
say she would like to have one in front of the library fire, and the
only way she could get one would be to give it to you for Christmas."

His father laughed. "All right, get a big one."

"You will have to give me a gun. A real gun that will shoot. A big
one--so big." Tommy measured with his arms out straight. "Bigger than
that. And I tell you what I would do. I would get Johnny and we would
hitch hi