“Let me go to the south and I will make a lady of you,” he said.  “I will give you gold and silver and feather beds.  These environs are not fit for a bear to hibernate in.  Just think of our branch of the human family existing and suffering up here among the ice and snow for thousands of years and not having advanced one step from the hovel in which we were first produced?  Is the Eskimo destined to everlasting failure—­perpetual degeneration?  Must you and I be satisfied and consent to endure this animal existence to the end of our days because it is our only heritage from our ancestors?  No!  I say, a thousand times no.  I am ashamed of myself, my ancestors and my entire race,” he shouted, and the girl almost trembled in fear of him.  He must surely be demented.  But she still clung to him, thinking that her enchanting presence might cure him.  Thus love can be a very warm thing even up among the cold ice and snow.  Their cold, half frozen cheeks came together and she kissed him.  “Stay,” she murmured, coaxingly, as only a woman can.

“I will take passage south,” he continued unheedingly, “and will plunge myself into the midst of the big, busy, warm world, and will gain with one bound that social condition which it has taken the white man thousands of years to attain.”

Now, after all, was this man not right, and is the Eskimo not to be pitied?

The girl, seeing that her whole world was about to vanish from her, left the igloo weeping, and again crawled like a bear through the narrow tunnel to the colder world outside.

One day when the sun was just about to make its appearance above the horizon, and the long night was nearly at an end, two half starved and partially frozen white men burrowed their way into our hero’s igloo and asked for food and shelter.  The night had been long, dreary, dark and cold, and the approaching return of the sun was welcomed like a prodigal.  Is it a wonder then that the Eskimo worships the sun?  It seems his only hope, his only comfort; and it would seem to him, more than to any other, the source of all life, his only friend in his dire need.  The Eskimo offered the two strangers some meat, which they devoured greedily; and then they told a long, pitiful story.  They were explorers.  Their ship had been crushed hopelessly between masses of ice.  Fifty had started on the long journey south.  Provisions gave out.  Men had dropped off daily.  The trail was one long line of frozen corpses stretched out in the dark and silent night.  They two alone had survived, so far as the strangers were able to tell.  It was the usual tale of woe which befalls the Arctic or Antarctic explorers.  Beginning happily, hopefully, buoyantly; ending in misery, sorrow and death.  The strangers wanted a guide to lead them to the south—­to civilization and warmth.  They had not known what it was to be comfortable for two years; and they had not seen one square inch of bare ground during that period.