A GRUESOME CUSTOM 



the youngsters their ABC, and their smattering of 

 geography and arithmetic ; the man who sings the 

 tenor solos in the choir they were, after all, just 

 Eskimos, with all the instincts of the Eskimo still 

 strong within them, not a whit spoilt for the rough 

 life that is their inheritance. They bent in a group 

 over that quivering seal, and quaffed the warm blood 

 that welled out of it. That heartened them ! That 

 made them mighty hunters ! That kept the cold out 

 and, after all, it was a custom of the people. 



They picked up their oars and rowed on, and I 

 was thankful for what I had seen. The Eskimos are 

 Eskimos yet. 



The casual visitor in the summer time sees them 

 salting fish for market, and drinking tea and eating 

 biscuits ; he finds them wearing European clothes, 

 and great clod-hopping hob-nailed boots, that they 

 have bought from schooner folk in exchange for skin 

 clothes and home-made sealskin boots : he might 

 think that the Eskimos of the picture-books were 

 gone, and that only among the icy solitudes of the 

 Polar regions, and in the unknown creeks of Baffin's 

 Land, were there people true to the type. But no, 

 even in Labrador, where European missionaries have 

 been working for a hundred and forty years, and 

 where everybody is taught to read and write, where 

 Christianity has taken the place of the uncanny incan- 

 tations of the witch-finders and the weird chantings of 

 the priests of Torngak, the Eskimos are Eskimo to 

 the core. In the church, on the ship, in the presence 

 of visitors, their native ways are-not much in evidence ; 

 they are still shy of strangers, and fear to be laughed 

 at ; but with those who live among them, those who, 

 like myself, travel with them and eat with them and 



