vessels of the revenue service, which are kept constantly patrolling the waters about the islands, boarding vessels, counting the skins, and investigating the vessel’s movements.  It has been a duty requiring much tact and firmness, for many of the sealers are British, and the gravest international dissension might have arisen from any unwarrantable or arbitrary interference with their acts.  The extent of the duty devolving upon the cutters is indicated by some figures of their work in a single year.  The territory they patrolled covered sixty degrees of longitude and twenty-five of latitude, and the cruising distance of the fleet was 77,461 miles.  Ninety-four vessels were boarded and examined, over 31,000 skins counted, and four vessels were seized for violation of the treaty.  In the course of this work, the cutters engaged in it have performed many useful and picturesque services.  On one occasion it fell to one of them to go to the rescue of a fleet of American whalers who, nipped by an unusually early winter in the polar regions, were caught in a great ice floe, and in grave danger of starving to death.  The men from the cutters hauled food across the broad expanse of ice, and aided the imprisoned sailors to win their freedom.  The revenue officers, furthermore, have been to the people of Alaska the respected representatives of law and order, and in many cases the arbiters and enforcers of justice.  Along the coast of Alaska live tribes of simple and ignorant Indians, who were for years the prey of conscienceless whites, many of whom turned from the business of sealing, when the two Governments undertook its regulation, to take up the easier trade of fleecing the Indians.  The natives were all practised trappers and hunters, and as the limitations upon sealing did not apply to them, they had pelts to sell that were well worth the buying.  Ignorant of the values of goods, eager for guns and glittering knives, and always easily stupefied with whisky, the Indians were easy prey to the sea traders.  For a gun of doubtful utility, or a jug of fiery whisky, the Indian would not infrequently barter away the proceeds of a whole year of hunting and fishing, and be left to face the winter with his family penniless.  It has been the duty of the officers of the revenue cutters serving on the North Pacific station to suppress this illicit trade, and to protect the Indians, as far as possible, from fraud and extortion.  The task has been no easy one, but it has been discharged so far as human capacity would permit, so that the Alaska Indians have come to look upon the men wearing the revenue uniform as friends and counselors, while to a great extent the semi-piratical sailors who infested the coast have been driven into other lines of dishonest endeavor.  Perhaps not since the days of Lafitte and the pirates of Barataria has any part of the coast of the United States been cursed with so criminal and abandoned a lot of sea marauders as have for a decade frequented the waters off Alaska, the Pribylof