403 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
On the arrival of Alwak from the Victory, great was the joy 
of Narluwarga, on again beholding her betrothed husband ; he 
showed her the file, which had been given to him, and he also 
showed her a small bar of iron, which had not been given to him, 
but which, by some means, that out of respect to his character, 
shall not be mentioned, had found its way into his trousers; and 
greatly delighted was Narluwarga, with the riches that her 
intended spouse had so unexpectedly come into possession of. 
Narluwarga was not like Sterne’s Maria, of the finest order 
of fine forms; for like the shrubs and flowers of her country, her 
stature was stinted and dwarfish; and whatever sweetness she 
possessed, which nature had been pleased, in one of her most 
niggardly humours, to bestow upon her, had, in the verification 
of the poet’s words, been literally wasted on the desert air. 
Beauty is indeed an ideal thing, the wayward child of a vagrant 
fancy, shifting like the ever-varying cloud, and equally as fleet¬ 
ing and evanescent ; admitting, therefore, our ignorance of the 
standard of beauty, as acknowledged by the Esquimaux judges, 
it might happen, that although Narluwarga could not have en¬ 
joyed the pre-eminence, of being the reigning toast in the 
latitude of London, she still might be in the eyes of Alwak, all 
that the eye can look for, or the heart wish for, in woman. 
It appears, that the Esquimaux are subject to the same accidents 
and casualties in life, as the natives of more favored regions, and 
that with them the transition from joy to misery is sometimes as 
sudden, as the climate in which they live, is from storm to sun¬ 
shine. Scarcely had the blush of joy mantled over the cheek of 
Narluwarga on the return of her betrothed to his home, than the 
paleness of despair broke through the oily smearment on her coun¬ 
tenance, when the offer was pronounced, by Alwak, of conveying 
him to the country of the Kabloonas, by which it was clear to her, 
that she ran the risk of ever becoming a wife—at least not the 
wife of her betrothed Alwak. The moans and sighs of the unhap¬ 
py girl, sounded throughout the night in her now miserable home ; 
and they would doubtless have penetrated to the ears of Alwak, 
had the snow been of that porous nature, as to admit of their 
passage through it; but the rays of the sun had no sooner gilded 
