An old Scot once prayed, “O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin’ people at this time the savin’ grace o’ continuance.”  Only one man has less need to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo.  The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are never idle.  Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the little property that he has is well kept.  You find around this igloo no broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out dog-harness.  Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel.  Indeed, one may hazard the opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.

On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo attains the three score and ten Scriptural years.  Few, indeed, live beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty.  If his life is short, it is happy.  This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and spreading over every life it touches.

There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his generosity is sometimes embarrassing.  At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving.  One man exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all carved from a single piece of ivory.  He wanted thirty-five dollars or the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the leisure hours of two months.  The engineer tried to make him lower his price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was dropped back into artikki recesses.  Afterwards, with the air of a shy child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift.  It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who tried to beat down his price as “the cheap engineer.”

Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs, and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book.  Many of the men were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet nine inches.  One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our researches.  The whalers call him “Set-’em-Up,” for his name bears the convivial translation, “Give us a drink.”  “You going to make better man, you get Outside—­make him like Emmie-ray?” As Emmie-ray pursues the tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue, with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.