he bumper, pard, you know it's the last of March when no
live mining camp in this country has a thing but empty bottles to bump
with. Behold the size of the glass dump outside yonder if you don't
believe me", remarked the keeper of the place in vindication of his
house; but with sore regret in his voice.

"The story, the story! We want the story", sang out one and another by
the stove, "the fire is just a whoopin' and 'twill soon be goin' out".

"Well, then, here goes," said the miner addressed. "It happened two
years ago. I sold one of my Nome claims for fifteen hundred dollars with
slight prospecting, (like a blasted fool that I was) and after blowin'
in a good third or more of the money concluded to buy a thousand dollar
outfit and go to Norton Sound. It was late in October; the storms came
on, and the upshot of it was that we were ship-wrecked off the coast and
were finally put in at a small camp nearly a hundred miles from where we
wanted to winter. I had taken two men with me named Long and Hartley,
and though we saved, by hard fightin' in one way and another, the most
of our supplies, we were without shelter, except a couple of tents, with
an Arctic winter--our first in this country, upon us.

"Gee-Whilikins! Boys, it makes my black hair white to think of it! What
we suffered for two months in those tents was awful; for the camp was
full and there was not a vacant cabin anywhere. If there had been, you
know we were absolutely without money to buy or build with. How I cursed
myself for havin' foolishly spent hundreds of dollars on 'box rustlers'
at the Casino,--but that is another story, boys, so we'll pass it.

"In our new camp we had many Eskimos and all kinds of people. Among
others there was a little blue-eyed woman perhaps thirty years of age;
maybe more--maybe less. She was also evidently not where she had
intended to be, just like ourselves, but was a teacher, left over from
some stranded expedition, probably. Anyhow, there she was, and there we
were. We a-livin' in the tents, and the thermometer forty degrees below
zero. The teacher was stayin' with some of the Missionary folks only a
quarter of a mile away, and she was all right.

"In December the dogs of the camp began to go mad. Every few days one or
two had to be killed. Some men, you know, don't water their dogs once in
six weeks, if at all, and as everything is froze hard in winter, the
poor brutes go mad, exactly as in summer in the States, from