SUPERSTITIONS 



my leg is still lame. Why cannot it cure me at 

 once ? " But I found the Eskimos open to reason ; 

 they would listen gravely and seriously to little 

 lectures on elementary anatomy ; under proper super- 

 vision they were persuaded to try long courses of 

 treatment in the hope of eventual cure though 

 I expect that when they got away to their summer 

 tents or their sealing quarters they forgot again. 



There are not many traces of superstition still 

 lingering; but in my goings in and out I found a 

 few. I remember how frightened one young man 

 became because he had caught a fox with a peculiar 

 mark upon it : "I shall die soon," he said. 



There are a few little beliefs connected with occur- 

 rences in the hunt, but they are not often mentioned 

 in these days ; the fears and fancies of heathen times 

 have passed away. 



But I found the people afraid of the presence of 

 death : not of death itself that they meet with 

 equanimity ; but they are timid to be left with a 

 dying person, and for this reason, if for no other, a 

 deathbed is always surrounded by a crowd of friends. 

 They have the curious custom of pulling down a 

 bedstead on which a person has died, and building it 

 up in another part of the house ; and they sometimes 

 go to the extreme of dismantling the whole hut, and 

 building it again on another site. There seems to be 

 nothing but superstition to account for these customs, 

 for I have seen a man pull his hut down and build it 

 up from the same material elsewhere, while somebody 

 else put up a new hut on the discarded site. Super- 

 stition it seems to be, and as such it clings to the 

 Eskimo nature ; but I could not help thinking that, 



after all, it has a certain sanitary value. " Under 



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