Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of each other for better or for worse.  It is an easy union entered upon and maintained so long as both parties are pleased.  This arrangement has one manifest advantage,—­Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages.  When unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of the chimney.  When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium attaches.  As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam husband is expected, however, to play the game.  Last winter a young Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways.  She asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, “No.  You may go to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction, and I hunt.”  Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e., the sled and dogs, with him.  The once-wife, travelling five days and six nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father, for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the ex-bride’s feet became badly frozen.  Public opinion in this case was strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a tree handy he would have been lynched.  This would have been the first lynching recorded in Canada.  The feeling of the Eskimo community was that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper state to her father’s door or to let her have the dogs.

In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores.  The ceremonies which approximate in time to our New Year’s Day and Christmas show the importance they attach to concentrated thought.  Early in the morning of what corresponds to our New Year’s Day, two young men, one of them grotesquely dressed in women’s garments, visit every igloo and blow out each seal-oil lamp.  The lights are afterwards renewed from a freshly-kindled fire.  The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony, replied, “New light, new sun,” showing his belief that the sun was yearly renewed at this time.  This early morning visit from igloo to igloo reminds us of the “first-footing” of the Scottish village.  The mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the old Lord of Misrule.

About the season of Christmas, a great meeting is held in the igloo, presided over by the Angekok or medicine-man, who entreats the invisible powers for good fortune, immunity from storms, and a plenitude of blubber for the ensuing year.  This invocation is followed by a family feast.  Next day the ceremonies are carried on out-of-doors, where all from oldest to youngest form a ring-around-a-rosy.  In the centre of the circle is set a crock of water, while to the communal feast each person brings from his