in the same manner, without removing the hair.  Though now furnished with the materials for clothing, they were without the implements necessary for making them into articles of dress.  They had neither awls for making shoes and boots, nor needles for sewing their clothes.  Their ingenuity was, therefore, again put to the test, and was not slow in making up the deficiency.  They contrived to make both very well, out of the bits of iron which they had collected from time to time.  One of their most difficult tasks, was to make eyes to their needles; but this they accomplished with the help of their knife; for having ground it to a very sharp point, and heated a kind of wire, forged for the purpose, red-hot, they pierced a hole through one end, and by whetting and smoothing it on stones, brought the other to a point.  These needles were astonishingly well formed, nothing being amiss with them but the roughness of the eye, by which the thread was sometimes cut.  It was indeed surprising that they were so well made, considering the rude instruments with which they were fashioned.  Having no scissors, they were obliged to cut out their clothes with the knife; and though this was their first attempt at the trade of shoemaker or tailor, yet they contrived to cut out the articles which they required with as much precision as if they had served a regular apprenticeship to the business.  The sinews of the reindeer and bears answered for thread.  They set earnestly to their work.  For summer wear, they made a sort of jacket and trousers of the prepared skins; for winter, long fur-gowns, with hoods, made after the fashion of those worn by the Laplanders.

The constant employment which their necessities required, and the various difficulties which they had to overcome by ingenious contrivance, so far from having been a misfortune, may be considered as having been the means of preserving these poor men from sinking under their unhappy circumstances.  But accordingly as their ingenuity had supplied their wants, and their minds became more disengaged from expedients, their melancholy increased, and they looked round despondingly on the sterile and desolate region where, they felt, they were to spend the rest of their days, far away from the hearths of home, and from early friends and companions.  Even the probability of that little circle being lessened, and, it might be, reduced to one solitary being, was a dreadful thought:  each felt that this might be his own fate.  Then the fear of all means of sustenance failing, and the assaults of wild beasts, were dangers too glaring to be forgotten.  Alexis Himkof, who had left a wife and three children, suffered perhaps the most from heart-yearnings after home.