The fireplace just described as situated at the upper end of the apartment, has always two lamps facing different ways, one for each family occupying the corresponding bedplace.  There is frequently, also, a smaller and less-pretending establishment on the same model—­lamp, pot, net, and all—­in one of the corners next the door; for one apartment sometimes contains three families, which are always closely related; and no married woman, or even a widow without children, is without her separate fireplace.

With all the lamps lighted and the hut full of people and dogs, a thermometer placed on the net over the fire indicated a temperature of 38 deg.; when removed two or three feet from this situation, it fell to 31 deg.; and, placed close to the wall, stood at 23 deg., the temperature of the open air at the time being 25 deg. below zero.  A greater degree of warmth than this produces extreme inconvenience by the dropping from the roofs.  This they endeavour to obviate by applying a little piece of snow to the place from which a drop proceeds, and this adhering, is for a short time an effectual remedy; but for several weeks in the spring, when the weather is too warm for these edifices, and still too cold for tents, they suffer much on this account.

The most important, perhaps, of the domestic utensils, next to the lamp already described, are the _=o=otk~o~os~e~eks_, or stone pots for cooking.  These are hollowed out of solid lapis ollaris, of an oblong form, wider at the top than at the bottom all made in similar proportion; though of various sizes corresponding with the dimensions of the lamp which burns under it.  The pot is suspended by a line of sinew at each end to the framework over the fire, and thus becomes so black on every side that the original colour of the stone is in no part discernible.  Many of them were cracked quite across in several places, and mended by sewing with sinew or rivets of copper, iron, or lead, so as, with the assistance of a lashing and a due proportion of dirt, to render them quite watertight.

Besides the ootkooseeks, they have circular and oval vessels of whalebone, of various sizes, which, as well as their ivory knives made out of a walrus’s tusk, are precisely similar to those described on the western coast of Baffin’s Bay in 1820.  They have also a number of smaller vessels of skin sewed neatly together; and a large basket of the same material, resembling a common sieve in shape, but with the bottom close and tight, is to be seen in every apartment.  Under every lamp stands a sort of “save-all,” consisting of a small skin basket for catching the oil that falls over.  Almost every family was in possession of a wooden tray very much resembling those used to carry butcher’s meat in England, and of nearly the same dimensions, which we understood them to have procured by way of Noowook.  They had a number of the bowls or cups already once or twice alluded to as being made out of the thick root of the horn of the musk-ox.  Of the smaller part of the same horn they also form a convenient drinking-cup, sometimes turning it up artificially about one third from the point, so as to be almost parallel to the other part, and cutting it full of small notches as a convenience in grasping it.  These or any other vessels for drinking they call Imm=o=ochiuk.