A SCRUBBING BRUSH EPISODE 



turned the boards the proper way up, so that the 

 floors told tales of" Cube Sugar" and " Prime Lard " 

 and "per Harmony to Okak." But the boards were 

 there, and the trampled slush that I have had to 

 splash through on my visits, and that reeked of 

 what Shakespeare might have had in mind when 

 he wrote " a very ancient and fish-like smell," was 

 abolished. 



But it was all very well to teach the people to 

 have wooden floors ; that was only half the lesson. 

 The floors wanted washing ! Eskimo floors are 

 proverbially filthy ; the thing cannot be helped. If 

 the hunter is to earn his living, if his wife is to do 

 her work and make the most of his catch, the seals 

 must be thawed and cut up, and the floor will be 

 spattered with blood and oil. Floor-washing is an 

 established custom in most of the houses in fact 

 many of them are scrubbed out every day ; but it 

 looked as if it would be difficult to get the owners of 

 the dismal little iglos to alter their ways ; folks who 

 had only got a dim inkling of the value of ventilation 

 and clean floors, and who had mostly lived their 

 lives under the shade of seal-bowel window panes 

 and in the odour of blubber-soaked floors it seemed 

 as if it would be hard to persuade them to scrub those 

 floors and open those windows. But the idea was 

 there, working in their own minds, talked over, 

 maybe, at their great palavers ; better times are in 

 store for the Eskimos, and the making of better 

 things is in their own grasp, though perhaps they 

 only partly know it. I got a hint of the trend of 

 things from an Eskimo woman, a nice quiet soul, 

 a widow, whose misfortune it was to live in a hut 



of the most horrible sort. Her son was somehow 



315 



