mo lad is no
molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a
walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was
neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of
tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball,
down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft
parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal
Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under
dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."

The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.
It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated
difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on
each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his
adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound
by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to
him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.
All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a
row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind,
for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted
discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the
ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball
diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line
of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and
out among the camps of the Eskimo,--"Self-reverence, self-knowledge,
self-control."

[Illustration: Farthest North Football]

What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude
imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and
"visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas;
but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up
in her mother's long dresses.

[Illustration: Two Spectators at the Game]

When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in
spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative
of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time
that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle
are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the
meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south