22 AN ESKIMO VILLAGE 



ing his head, he suddenly caught sight of the 

 woman, who had crept from her hiding-place to con- 

 front him. The neighbours waited. With a yell of 

 terror for he thought he saw a ghost the 

 wretched man fled into the night and was seen no 

 more. 



This is one of the stories Juliana told me, gathered 

 from the lore of her father and grandfather ; Juliana, 

 the schoolmistress of our village and nurse in the 

 little mission hospital that stands by the brookside 

 and under the shadow of the church tower ; Juliana, 

 a Christian woman and a leader of her people, but a 

 descendant of the folk who lived in that heathen vil- 

 lage, and carrying in her memory some of the lore 

 of those old times. You shall meet Juliana again, my 

 reader, and I have told the story to give you a 

 glimpse of the sort of life that was lived in that old 

 heathen village, that village that is to-day no more 

 than a rocky hillside dotted with grass-grown 

 mounds. 



Many a time did I wander among those mounds 

 and dig in their crumbling walls. They seemed quiet 

 and strange, with their reminders of olden times, but 

 stranger still was the old burying-place of the people 

 of that village, hard by upon a stony waste, hidden 

 behind a wall or rock. There you may see the stony 

 heaps, under which the bones of those forgotten 

 people lie. You may peer between the chinks and 

 see them, moss-grown and bleached, and close be- 

 side are the heaps of stones that cover the belong- 

 ings of the dead. Here a hunter's tomb, with arrows 

 and harpoon ; here a woman's bones are laid, with 



