“Oh, for a sight of mother earth!” they shouted.  “We would gladly eat the soil, and chew the bark from the trees.”  Thus one does not appreciate the most trivial and simple but indispensable things until one is deprived of them for a period of more or less duration.

Our hero agreed to guide them so far as his knowledge extended—­even to the very gateway between the north and south lands—­if they would guarantee to guide him from that point into their own big, beautiful world further on; they taking the helm when his usefulness as a guide would be exhausted; and he explained his ambition to them.

So, one morning when summer was approaching, and the sun, for the first time in the year was sending her streamers above the horizon, and when his sweetheart Lola stood with arms outstretched over the cold snow and ice towards him, pleading and sending forth her last appeal to his stony heart, he walked out across the white table-land towards the south, and was soon a small black speck in the far horizon.

When the strange expedition reached Dawson they discarded their hibernating costumes and substituted more modern ones, not so much because they were out of fashion, but because they rendered them somewhat uncomfortable.  At this point the white men grasped the helm and the Eskimo followed.  At Fort Fraser our hero discarded more of his clothing, and at Quesnel he became determined to strip himself.  “I cannot stand this heat,” he said; “why, it will kill me.”

“Heat?  Kill you?” exclaimed his two companions.  “Why, the thermometer is scarcely above the freezing point.  If this moderate climate makes you uncomfortable, what will be your condition in California?  Why, you will melt away like a candle beside a red-hot stove.”  And thus they joked with him, not taking him seriously.  So they sailed along and in due time reached Ashcroft.  The Eskimo perspired to such an extent that his condition threatened to become dangerous.  The slightest covering of clothing became a burden to him, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that his companions could prevent him from stripping himself naked.  They persuaded him that he should return before it was too late, but he would not hear of it.  “I have made my nest; I will sit in it to the bitter end,” he said.  They boarded the midnight train, and in a few moments he was fleeing to the sunny south a great deal faster than ever dog team or sledge had taken him across the frozen plateau.  And the farther south he went the more he suffered from the heat, until he was in great danger of melting away.  And then the truth dawned upon him; it had never occurred to him before.  He was a fish trying to live out of water.  He discovered that what his mind had pictured, and his heart had longed for, his constitution could not endure.  He was doomed to live and die in the frozen north.  Oh, those savage, unprogressive, half-animal ancestors!  And for the first time he thought of his igloo, his