In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes.  The wedding breakfast consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat).  The ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do’s bungalow is ten by twelve, one needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as “odours of Edom and offerings Divine.”

The festivities began to warm up about midnight.  An old chap, with a retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance.  His wife, a gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the air being confined to three notes.  After each line came the chorus twice repeated,

“Ai, yea, yae!  Yae, yae, ya—­yae!”

Dancing was kept up to an early hour.  Overcome by the air, respiratory and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride, pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.

By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America.  The Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known but little of other bands than his own.  Yet sometimes they met.  There is an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty miles west of Herschel.  For years this was a trading rendezvous for four peoples:  the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo, and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of Barter Island.  To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days brought their most precious medium of exchange,—­a peculiar blue jade, one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins.  And thereby hangs a tale.  Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi’s ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.

This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and merriment.  In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and courtesies with their half-known kin.  The barter consummated, these Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of delight.  No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no red-hots nor “fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled and f-five a bag!”, but the Arctic concomitants of these,—­boiled beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that smells to high heaven.  Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island.  It is only the counters that are different.