AN ESKIMO ROMANCE 121 



So the heathen woman had set out upon her 

 journeyings. The way had been long and wearisome. 

 She moved from village to village, always seek- 

 ing news of her brother, and always with the same 

 answer to her questionings : her brother had gone 

 farther south, farther south. 



In the course of her travellings she came to our 

 village of Okak, and she was very weary. She would 

 stay among the hospitable folk of Okak for a while 

 and rest herself before she took up the trail again ; 

 and so, in the kind and simple way that the Eskimos 

 have, she was made welcome. And thus it came 

 about that the heathen woman lived and walked and 

 worked among the Okak people for many weeks. 



The winter was nearly over ; the worst of the 

 storms were gone ; the milder days of spring-time 

 were coming ; and the heathen woman was home- 

 sick. 



She had been happy in our village ; the people had 

 shown kindness to her, they had given her a roof 

 over her head and a bed to lie upon, they had fed her 

 even to the sharing of their last bite, but, after all, 

 our village was not her home. 



If you, my reader, were to go to Killinek, which 

 was "home" to that heathen woman, you would 

 wonder that anyone could love so bare and dreary 

 a spot. Bleak and dismal, raining and snowing by 

 turns in the height of the summer, misty and raw 

 even in August, with scarcely a blade of grass to 

 relieve the sullen greyness of the rocks, Killinek is 

 surely of all the villages of Labrador, the most for- 

 bidding. 



