“My enumeration work was in Kentucky,” said Hamilton, “so I haven’t much line on the conditions in the North.  But I’ve always enjoyed books and stories about Alaska, and I’d like to read the report.”

“It will give you the atmosphere,” said Barnes, “listen to this paragraph, for example:  ’The work was performed during the severest winter known in this part of Alaska by the oldest settlers there.  There did not appear to be a man who did not have a pride in his work, an anxiety to create a record for traveling time, a desire to enumerate all the people in the district assigned to him, and to have to his credit less loss of time because of weather than any of the other agents.’”

“I guess,” said Hamilton, “that supervisor had those enumerators just breaking their necks to beat out the other agents, and he worked on their pride to get up their speed.”

“’That the service lost none of its men from freezing to death, and that every man returned safely, is a matter for congratulation and of good fortune, from the fact that there were in this part of Alaska more deaths from the weather this winter than all preceding years in total; cases in which those who met such deaths did not begin to go through the sacrifice and privation that these agents of the service did.’”

“Makes you proud to have been an enumerator, doesn’t it?” asked the boy.  “But it always seems difficult to realize hardship unless you have been there.”

“I spent a winter in Alaska,” said Barnes emphatically, “and I can feel the thrill of it in every line.  He knows what he’s writing of, too, this man.  Hear how he describes it:  ‘All the men in the service,’” he continued, “’covered hundreds of miles over the ice and snow, in weather ranging from 30 to 70 degrees below zero, the average temperature probably being about 40 below.  Because of the absolute lack of beaten trails—­’ I wonder,” he broke off, “if any one who hasn’t been there can grasp what it means!”

Hamilton waited.

“No beaten trail,” Barnes said reminiscently, “means where stunted willows emphasize by their starved and shivering appearance the nearness of the timber; where the snow-drifts, each with its little feather of drifting snow sheering from its crest, are heaped high; where the snow underfoot is unbroken; where under snow-filled skies a wind studded with needle-sharp ice crystals blows a perfect gale; where the lonely and frozen desolation is peopled only by the haunting shape of fear that next morning a wan and feeble sun may find you staggering still blindly on, hopelessly lost, or fallen beside a drift where the winter’s snows must melt before your fate is known.”

He stopped abruptly and went on with his schedule.  Hamilton worked on in silence.  Presently, as though there had been no pause, Barnes resumed his quotation from the supervisor’s report: