IN GREEN ALASKA 



the ruins of an older or earlier village, the foun- 

 dations of whale bones partly overgrown by the 

 turf. 



As we came in at one end of the encampment 

 most of the dogs went out at the other end. They 

 had never before seen such looking creatures, and 

 they fled off toward the mountain, where they sat 

 down and howled their mournful protest. Some of 

 the children were frightened too ; one youngster of 

 five or six years, stuffed like a small scarecrow, riding 

 astride his mother's neck, cried and yelled vigorously 

 as we approached. The sun was bright, but the air 

 was very chilly, the mercury standing at about 38° 

 Fahrenheit. We were within one hundred and twenty 

 miles of the Arctic circle. The slender peninsula we 

 were on was a few hundred feet wide; it was marshy 

 in some places, but for the most part dry and covered 

 with herbage. Here were yellow poppies bloom- 

 ing, and two species of saxifrage. In my walk I 

 came upon a large patch of ground covered with a 

 small, low, pink primrose. The ground was painted 

 with it. But the prettiest flower we found was a 

 forget-me-not, scarcely an inch high, of deep ultra- 

 marine blue, — the deepest, most intense blue I 

 ever saw in a wild flower. Here also we saw and 

 heard the Lapland longspur and the yellow wag- 

 tail. A flock of male eider ducks was seen in the 

 bay. 



Ill 



