“Billy, I’ll give it to you?”

“Will you, Sammy?  Try it, old boy.”

Thereupon, he put his thumb to his nose and wriggled his finger as exasperatingly as any Yankee boy here in this enlightened land.  His flat face, his black little eyes, his stubby little nose, his hair black as coal and long behind, but fashionably “banged” in front, the seal-skin suit, mother’s big red boots, and the nasal gesture made a very interesting picture, and a most provoking one also.

“Billy, you will catch it!”

“I should rather think you had caught it already.  Did you bring any seal-fat, Sammy?”

Sammy felt mad enough and hot enough to set the water to boiling between his kayah and the shore.

“You had better run, Billy.”

“Plenty of time, Sammy.”

Sammy’s kayah was now ashore.  Sammy unlaced his jacket and let himself out of jail.  Pulling his kayah high up the shore, he turned it over and let the water escape.  There were two ugly gashes in the seal-skin bottom—­just as he expected.

“Now where’s that Billy?” asked Sammy at last.  But mother’s red boots had prudently withdrawn.

“I will give it to him,” said Sammy; “but I will mend this first.”

He took up his beloved kayah and walked to the little village.  It was not very large.  There were half a dozen seal-skin tents, a few houses of stone and turf, and one or two wooden buildings, besides the government-house that proudly supported the flag of Denmark.

“What do you want, Sammy?” said his mother, as he appeared at the door of one of the seal-skin tents.  She was sitting on a bed of reindeer skins.

“I want needle and thread, mother.  That Billy Blubber cut some holes in my kayah.”

“Billy Blubber did?”

“Yes,” said Sammy, “and I would like to sew him up in a seal-skin and drop him from the top of an iceberg into the sea.”

“Tut, tut, Sammy.  It’s a boy’s trick.  Let it go.”

“There,” thought Sammy, shouldering his kayah and moving off, “that is what mother always says when Billy harms me.”

“Where are you going, Sammy?”

“Off to mend my kayah, mother.”

“Nonsense!  Only women can mend kayahs.  I will fix it.  You go off and take a walk, and then come to dinner.  We are going to have a young seal.”

A seal!  Wasn’t that nice?  Who wouldn’t be a young Greenlander, own a kayah, and have seal for dinner?  The prospect before Sammy made him feel better.  The world, too, looked different.

“What a nice place we live in!” thought Sammy.  “I wouldn’t live in Denmark for anything, old Denmark, where our rulers come from.”

The scenery about the Greenland village was indeed interesting.  There was the blue sea before it, dotted with “pond-lilies.”  Off the mouth of the harbor, the icebergs went sailing by, so white, so stately, so slow, like a fleet almost becalmed.  Back of the village swelled the rocky cliffs bare of snow now, and many rivulets went flashing down their sides from ponds and pools nestling in granite recesses.  Away off, towered the mountains, their still snowy tops suggesting the powdered heads of grand old Titans sitting there in state.