No, I had really had no luck at present on my Alaskan tour, but I was naturally sanguine and hoped still something from Sitka.

Most capitals give you something if you visit them, and Sitka was the capital of Alaska.

As I lay in my berth that night, made wakeful by the bright light, I was thinking over past incidents in my life and all the Minnies and Marys that had been connected with them.  They seemed all to have been Mary or Minnie with Marias in Italy and France.  I fell asleep at last, hoping whatever Fate had in store for me at Sitka, it wouldn’t be a Mary or a Minnie, but some new name embodying a new idea.

CHAPTER II

THE TEA-SHOP

When we landed at Sitka I went ashore with a fellow passenger.  He was a clever man, and had made trips up there already for the sake of taking photographs of the people and the scenery; he knew Sitka well and came up to me just before we arrived there with the remark: 

“If you come with me I’ll take you to have tea with the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen.”

This certainly seemed an invitation to accept, and I did so on the spot.

“She really is,” he continued, observing my sceptically raised eyebrows, “wonderfully pretty.  She keeps a tea-shop and she is Chinese.”  With that he bolted into his own cabin, which was next mine, and as I heard him laughing, I concluded he was joking and thought no more about it.  However, as the ship glided up over flat sheets of golden water to the landing-stage, he joined me again, and together we stood looking up the principal street of Sitka which runs down to meet the little quay.

It was just four in the afternoon, and everything was vivid living gold, as the floods of yellow sunshine filled all the shining air.  The green copper dome of the church alone stood out a soft spot of delicate colour in the dazzling burnished haze.

At the sides of the street sat and crouched the small squat figures of the Alaskan Indians, each with a mat before it on which the owner had set out his little store of wares—­bottles of various-coloured sands, reindeer slippers beautifully embroidered in blue beads, carved walrus teeth.

We stepped on the shore and the Indians looked up at us with quaint brown questioning eyes, like their own seals.

They did not ask you to buy, but watched you silently.

“Come along,” said my friend, “we’ll go up and get tea before there’s a crowd.”

After about five minutes’ walk, while I was gazing about interested in this quaint little capital, my companion suddenly exclaimed: 

“In here,” and turned through an opening at the corner of a square enclosure on our right hand.  I followed, and saw we had entered a little square court or compound, similar to those with which the poorer classes in any Eastern community surround their huts.