TVrangell Island 



a dull, muffled stir gradually deepening. There were 

 only two white babies in the town, so far as I saw, 

 and as for Indian babies, they woke and ate and made 

 no crying sound. Later you might hear the croaking 

 of ravens, and the strokes of an axe on firewood. 

 About eight or nine o'clock the town was awake, 

 Indians, mostly women and children, began to gather 

 on the front platforms of the half-dozen stores, sitting 

 carelessly on their blankets, every other face hideously 

 blackened, a naked circle around the eyes, and per- 

 haps a spot on the cheek-bone and the nose where the 

 smut has been rubbed off. Some of the little children 

 were also blackened, and none were over-clad, their 

 light and airy costume consisting of a calico shirt 

 reaching only to the waist. Boys eight or ten years 

 old sometimes had an additional garment, — a pair 

 of castaway miner's overalls wide enough and ragged 

 enough for extravagant ventilation. The larger girls 

 and young women were arrayed in showy calico, and 

 wore jaunty straw hats, gorgeously ribboned, and 

 glowed among the blackened and blanketed old crones 

 like scarlet tanagers in a flock of blackbirds. The 

 women, seated on the steps and platform of the trad- 

 ers' shops, could hardly be called loafers, for they had 

 berries to sell, basketfuls of huckleberries, large yel- 

 low salmon-berries, and bog raspberries that looked 

 wondrous fresh and clean amid the surrounding 

 squalor. After patiently waiting for purchasers until 

 hungry, they ate what they could not sell, and went 

 away to gather more. 



Yonder you see a canoe gliding out from the shore, 



[29] 



