At first hardly any of the girls came. The lit- 

 tle Eskimo girls of St. Lawrence Island are the 

 most timid, bashful creatures that can be im- 

 agined ; they skulk and hide like hares. And bj^ 

 the way, there is little in the native dress to 

 distinguish boys from girls, and for awhile we 

 could hardly tell them apart. Soon my wife in- 

 quired into the non-attendance of the girls, and 

 learned that they were afraid, both of me and of 

 the larger boys. 



At last she persuaded Mrs. Koogak to bring her 

 two little daughters to the schoolhouse one 

 afternoon, after the usual pupils had been dis- 

 missed, and then set to work in kindergarten 

 ways to interest and reassure the chubby tojs. 

 Others were afterward brought, and in the course 

 of a week Mrs. Gambell had collected seventeen 

 girls for a kind of evening~school, beginning at 

 three o'clock every afternoon. 



The sun now rose a little before ten o'clock in 

 the morning, and set before two in the after- 

 noon. When the weather was cloudy we had to 

 keep a lamp constantly burning. Even on fair 

 days it was dark at three o'clock in the after- 

 noon. On the afternoon of December fifth, an 

 adventure befell Mrs. Gambell and her class of 

 girls. 



A thick poorga, or snow-storm, had whirled 

 down upon us the day before from the north ; a 

 foot of snow had Jfallen, and great drifts nearly 

 buried the village and blocked up the windows 

 of the schoolhouse. Ice-floes, packing against 



the coast, pressed great masses ashore in hum- 

 mocks twenty or thirty feet in height. The en- 

 tire sea, across to Siberia, was covei'ed with ice. 



Most of the boys came early to school despite 

 the storm, and in the afternoon two of the Es- 

 kimo women wallowed through the drifts to 

 bring their little girls. I dismissed the boys for 

 the day, when I saw my neighbor, Koogak, has 

 tening past the schoolhouse with his gim. He 

 told me he was going to hunt a white bear which 

 had come ashore from the ice not far from the 

 village, and had dug into a cache of meat belong- 

 ing to the Noosik family. 



Muffling myself in my fur coat and hood, and 

 snatching up my gun, I went along with him to 

 see the sport. Althovigh the snow was flying so 

 fiercely that one could hardly see an object ten 

 yards away, we were joined by fourteen or fif- 

 teen others. We found the bear's tracks several 

 times, but soon lost them again among the ice 

 hummocks to which the animal had retired. 



We went for a while into Shuglavvina's house, 

 to warm ourselves and to turn out the dogs, after 

 which we again M'ent forth and spent an hour or 

 more hunting among the hummocks. We found 

 no bear, however, for the best of i-easons. The 

 bear was now at the other end of the village, 

 and my wife was having all the " sport " at the 

 schoolhouse. 



The storm was so severe that only five of the 

 girls had come at three o'clock. The lamp was 

 set on the teacher's desk, and Mrs. Gambell had 



