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very well walk here! or: how delightfnlly down hill il is here! 

 — may be heard the greatest transitions of tone of such a 

 nature that one unconsciously gets the impression that the 

 speakers are down-right whole-souled, good-hearted people 

 with lively and emotional temperaments. 



QeqertarsnuHsiaq (February 10). It is a pleasure to 

 stand and listen to a group of Greenlanders eagerly discussing 

 the condition of the fjords. How is the ice? is it possible to 

 drive around this or that point of land? is there open water 

 in the sound by the Sea-dogs' point? is the ice cleft by the 

 current? can it bear out there beyond Eagle Mountain, or 

 must one follow the beach? who was there last? The voices 

 become eager, high; questions and answers follow closer 

 upon each other; the flow of talk runs rapidly, warmly, natur- 

 ally, in long, period-like words, which are kept at the same 

 high, shrill pitch until the voice, just before it is about to 

 cease, makes a great plunge into the deep only to rise again 

 immediately to an interrogative height — or vice-versa ends 

 in the deep, thus establishing a fact. Scarcely is the sentence 

 at an end before it is succeeded by a flow of talk which is 

 pitched in another key. 



Jakobshavn (November 1900). One evening in iX-umiut 

 I listened to a long tale which an old Eskimo woman was 

 telling in a half whisper and in a strange manner as if with 

 two interchanging voices. 



Oommannaq (July 1901). In listening to the musical 

 accent in a long, rapid account of some event, I am always 

 struck by the continual interchange between two difîerent keys; 

 the speaker almost seems to talk with two different voices, 

 now a high voice, which gradually comes into play during the 

 flow of talk as the speaker becomes excited in reporting lively 

 episodes or conversations or anything which rouses his enthu- 

 siasm; now a lower voice, which he uses when he has come 



