558 Notes on the Labrador Eskimo [June, 
rians are under obligations for the success these devoted Mora- 
vians have had in preserving on American soil this interesting 
people intact, unmixed, and with some of their harmless and more 
interesting habits preserved. They are, however, doomed, judg- 
ing by the past years’ experience, to ultimate extinction. 
As regards the longevity of these people, we understood the 
oldest person at Hopedale, the patriarch of the colony, to be a 
woman of seventy years; we saw her, a picture of uglinesss 
which still haunts our memory. There were three Eskimo who 
were sixty years old. A man becomes prematurely old when 
forty-five years of age, as the hunters are by that time worn out 
by the hardships of the autumnal seal fishery. 
The Eskimo settlement of Hopedale, the only one we visited, 
was founded in 1782. It consisted in 1864 of about thirty-five 
houses, arranged with more or less disorder in three principal 
streets. They are mostly built of upright spruce logs with the 
bark still on, dovetailed at the corners and banked nearly to the 
eaves with turf on the outside; the roof rather flat, though irregu- 
lar, with a skylight and small window in one side, either as in the 
case of the more well-to-do families consisting of a rude sash 
with four or six glass panes, or panes of the intestines of the 
seal sewed together. 
The house is entered through a long low porch, probably the 
survival of an ancient style, z. e., the low porch of their snow 
houses through which their forefathers crept on their hands and 
knees. On entering we were obliged to stoop low and to circum- 
spectly make our way between the carcass of a seal or a codfish, 
as the case might be, and a vessel of familiar, democratic shape 
and use, filled with urine, in which the sealskins are soaked before 
being chewed between the teeth of the housewife, an important 
step in the process of making or mending sealskin boots; while 
Eskimo dogs of various sizes and colors blocked the devious 
way. i 
Across the end of the interior, which was floored with wood, 
and in which we could not stand erect, was a wooden bed or 
seat, a sort of divan, on which sat a woman in spectacles weaving 
a basket of dried rushes which had been colored blue or red; 
~ she nodded a welcome and made us feel quite at home. The 
other beleogisgr of the house were a hearth or fire-place of a 
few pebbles sii on one side, a soapstone lamp which was a 
