66 A'N ESQUIMAU FAMILY. 



Six years' experience among the wild men of this 

 barren coast had brought him to their level of filthy 

 ugliness. His companions were his wife, who carried 

 her first-born in a hood upon her back ; her brother, a 

 bright-eyed boy of twelve years, and "an ancient 

 dame with voluble and flippant tongue," her mother. 

 They were all dressed in skins, and, being the first 

 Esquimaux we had seen whose habits remained wholly 

 uninfluenced by contact with civilization, they were, 

 naturally, objects of much interest to us all. 



Hans led us up the hill-side, over rough rocks and 

 through deep snow-drifts, to his tent. It was pitched 

 about two hundred feet above the level of the sea, in 

 a most inconvenient position for a hunter ; but it was 

 his "lookout." Wearily he had watched, year after 

 year, for the hoped-for vessel ; but summer after sum- 

 mer passed and the vessel came not, and he still sighed 

 for his southern home and the friends of his youth. 



His tent was a sorry habitation. It was made after 

 the Esquimau fashion, of seal-skins, and was barely 

 large enough to hold the little family who were 

 grouped about us. 



I asked Hans if he would go with us. 



" Yes ! " 



Would he take his wife and baby. 



"Yes!" 



Would he go without them. 



"Yes!" 

 • Having no leisure to examine critically into the 

 state of his mind, and having an impression that the 

 pemianent separation of husband and wife is regarded 

 as a painful event, I gave the Esquimau mother the 

 benefit of this conventional suspicion, and brought 

 them both aboard, with their baby and their tent and 



