684 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



that they considered best and most tempting. I was almost ashamed 

 that not one of these delicacies appealed to me in itself, although 

 no one could appreciate more keenly the sentiment which they 

 represented. 



Mrs. Schultz had talked of how much she had longed for this 

 or that thing which Dr. Burke had brought me. I tried to com- 

 promise so that she might profit through my forgetfulness of south- 

 ern food fashions as far as was possible without giving offense 

 to my friends at Fort Yukon. I asked Dr. Burke's advice on this 

 point, and when he was convinced that my tastes were really as 

 perverted as I said, he suggested that if I were to keep a quarter 

 of each kind of thing sent to me, forwarding the rest to Mrs. 

 Schultz, the women at Fort Yukon would probably feel quite all 

 right about it. So I kept one of the chickens, two or three of the 

 apples, some of the gingerbread, and so on through the list. 

 Judging from Mrs. Schultz' thanks and the kindness of every one 

 at Fort Yukon, I have concluded that no one was offended and 

 that everything went as it should. Those that hankered for them 

 got the chicken, eggs and fruit while I ate huge meals of moose 

 and caribou which I much preferred. 



We were more than half-way from Old Rampart to Fort Yukon 

 when, April 24th, Archdeacon Stuck and Walter Harper caught up 

 to us. They had arrived at Herschel Island a few days after we 

 left. On his way east along the coast from Point Barrow the 

 Archdeacon had learned of my illness from Captain Hadley at 

 Barter Island and had hurried on to Herschel Island with the in- 

 tention of doing just what I had hoped he would do — taking me to 

 the Fort Yukon hospital. They had now come south by a dif- 

 ferent route. 



Archdeacon Stuck's book, "A Winter Circuit of our Arctic 

 Coast," is to me all the more delightful because he finds abundant 

 leisure to digress on all sorts of things only indirectly concerned 

 with his story. That is the advantage of writing a book about the 

 journey of half a year instead of trying to deal with five years, as 

 we have had to do — not that I could compete with him in this 

 field in any case. In the account of how he proceeded eastward 

 along the Alaska coast, he mentions picking up the news of my 

 illness and how he formed the plan of bringing me with him. On 

 page 346 is his mention of the meeting: 



"By five o'clock we were moving again, and a long journey of 

 thirteen hours — the dogs doing much better than in the daytime — 

 brought us out not only to John Herbert's place but to the com- 



