This hall afforded entrance to three apartments, occupied each by a separate family. The mansion indeed accommodated five families, which consisted of sixty-four men, women, and children. The structure of these abodes was curious, and the material of them-snow.

Snow was formed into curved slabs of about two feet long, and half a foot thick. These were laid together in the form exhibited in the print, making a dome-shaped structure, the figure of a straw beehive. This was raised six feet above ground, and measured fourteen feet in diameter. A plate of ice in the roof served for a window, and admitted the light as through ground glass.

This little village appeared at first like a cluster of hillocks amid the snow; but successive falls filled up the vacuities, and converted it into a smooth surface, upon which the boys were accustomed to play. It was no unusual circumstance for the inmates of the house, after thawing had commenced, to see a leg penetrated through their ceiling.

All the light and heat enjoyed in these dwellings is from a large lamp, suspended from the ceiling in the Greenland fashion. The family sit round on a bench of snow, covered with twigs and skins These houses are kept cold, else the material of them would be melted. When at last it begins to drip, from the influence of the summer sun, out come the inmates, and contrive a summer house for a few months' residence.

In preference to strong liquors, this people drink water of melted snow in large quantities, and prefer fat substances to any other food. Captain

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Lyon gave a young girl a tallow candle, and she instantly devoured it.

Though the Esquimaux are very dirty in their habits, they do not appear to be negligent in their dress. Their clothes are carefully fitted, and well made. Like the Greenlanders, the Esquimaux use the sinews of animals for thread. The seams in their garments, which are often made of rich furs, are ornamented, and the edges bordered by trimmings. In the Esquimaux, as in other Indians, the love of ornament is obvious.

Fortunately for the Esquimaux, the inhabitants of the water respire the same element with himself; and when the seals come to open spaces in the ice, they can there be attacked and taken. There the Esquimaux makes himself a little shed, and with indefatigable patience waits till he gets an opportunity to take his destined prey.

During the short summer, they pursue the deer with bow and arrow. His flesh as meat, and his skin as clothing, is preferred to all other. The early winter drives the deer in great droves to milder climes, and then the Esquimaux depend upon the seal, the walrus, and the whale for subsistence. For nine months in the year they are separated from their prey by the ice.

Their grandest achievement consists in the attack of the whale, on which occasion a large body of them unite, armed with a variety of weapons. When struck, he instantly plunges into the water; but being obliged to come up at short intervais, is always attacked afresh, till, overcome by fatigue and loss of blood, this mighty monarch of the deep yields to a diminutive but powerful foe.

An Esquimaux does not hesitate even singly to attack the polar bear, the fiercest and most terrible of all the arctic races. In this encounter, however, he must be aided by his trusty band of dogs, which rush fearlessly on, keep the animal at bay, and assail him on all sides, while the master advances with his spear, and avoiding with wonderful agility the springs of the enraged monster, pierces him with repeated strokes.

Honesty among the Esquimaux was perfectly observed among themselves. Dresses, sledges, tools, all their little property was exposed to all, but always safe, inside or outside of their huts. There are neither laws, nor magistrates, nor penalties, but property is perfectly secure among them.

The navigators were received with the most cordial hospitality in their little huts. The best meat

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was set before the Kablunaks, and the women vied with each other in the attention of cooking for them, and in drying and mending their clothes. "The women working and singing, their husbands quietly mending their lines, the children playing before the door, and the pot boiling over the blaze of a cheerful lamp," gave a pleasing picture of savage life.

The children are treated, like those of the Greenlanders, with extreme tenderness; and like that people, the Esquimaux have little compassion upon the widow, the aged, and the infirm. The Esquimaux have nearly the same fables concerning religion which the Greenlanders believed in.

CHAPTER XIII.

Ir is well known to my young readers that the United States of America, their own native land, occupies a large portion of the American continent. The United States' territory, from the southern point of Florida to the boundary line of the Oregon territory in the extreme north, extends from the 24th to the 49th parallel of latitude, and in a transverse direction from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

The discovery and settlement of this territory is too long a history for this volume; therefore only a few facts in relation to the United States can be inserted in these pages. Of some of these important facts we are informed from our infancy— as that the greater part of the inhabitants of the