e, a
gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in
the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the
air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice
repeated,

"Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya--yae!"

Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory
and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride,
pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.

By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most
admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most
misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The
Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known
but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is
an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line
between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty
miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four
peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo,
and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of
Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days
brought their most precious medium of exchange,--a peculiar blue jade,
one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a
tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so
the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's
ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.

This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and
merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old
men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious
oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and
courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these
Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of
delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no
red-hots nor "fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled
and f-five a bag!", but the Arctic concomitants of these,--boiled
beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that
smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in
the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the
counters that ar