NATIVE DOCTORS 



" No, he has no pains in his knees." 



Now all this, long-winded though it may sound, 

 is a perfectly characteristic interview ; it gives a 

 thoroughly true picture of the deliberation of an 

 Eskimo statement. 



"For what purpose does the old man want 

 ; knee-medicine." 



" Issumamnik " (my own idea), she said, " the 



poor old man has such feeble knees ; they totter 



I and shake when he gets out of bed in the morning, 



and when he gets up to walk about. I want some 



I good knee-medicine to cure that." 



Pathos and humour tumble over one another's 

 heels when one comes to deal with Eskimo requests, 

 and of course a good deal of the humour depended 

 on one's early struggles with the language. 



When I handed a person two pills, and tried 

 to say "Take one pill to-day, and the other to- 

 morrow," it struck me as very ludicrous to find, 

 after a hot chase through the pages of the grammar 

 book, that the proper way to put it was "Take 

 that pill to-day, and its wife to-morrow." While 

 I was up in the attic with the two carpenters, I 

 was startled to hear shrieks of immoderate laughter 

 pealing from downstairs. Presently our English 

 hospital nurse, a beginner at the language, came 

 up and said, " Sarah wants to see you, but when 

 I tell her to come up here she only laughs." 



When I got down to the porch Sarah went 

 off into more fits of laughter. " Ai-ai, uttilerket?" 

 (have you come back), she said. " Una " (that one) 

 pointing to the nurse " told me that you had gone 

 to heaven, and I might go there if I wanted to 

 speak to you." It was just an error of pronunciation, 



