while it is yet night and
cheweth the boots of her household."

Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove.
The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of
the woman are brought into requisition. The raw sealskins or hides of
the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up
and dried thoroughly. Before this stiff material can be worked up into
garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically
chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task. Creasing the hide along
its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way
along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way
back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of
the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.

It falls to the lot of the woman, too, to do her share of boat-making.
The men deftly fashion the frames of kayak and oomiak, using in their
construction not a single nail or piece of iron, but fastening the wood
together by pegs and thongs of skin. Then the women come on the scene,
measure the frame, and sew green hides of the proper shape to fit,
making wonderful overlapping seams that are absolutely watertight. As it
is necessary to put the skin covering on while the hides are raw, the
whole job has to be completed at one sitting. So a bee is held of the
women of the communal camp.

[Illustration: Cribbage-boards of Walrus Tusks

The scenes etched in the larger represent the events of one year of the
carver.]

Where did the Eskimo get his versatile ability? Only the walrus knows.
The whalers have inducted the Eskimo into the art of making
cribbage-boards. They use for each board a complete tusk of
walrus-ivory, covering the whole with a wealth of descriptive carvings
illustrative of all that comes into the yearly round of an Eskimo's
life,--ice-fishing, bear-hunting, walrus-sticking. So far as we could
find out, the Husky's connection with cribbage ceased with his making
these _edition de luxe_ boards. He seemed himself to have gathered no
inkling of the fine points of that game which one instinctively
associates with Dick Swiveller as tutor and as pupil the little
Marchioness, "that very extraordinary person, surrounded by mysteries,
ignorant of the taste of beer, and taking a limited view of society
through the key-holes of doors." In the world outside, far from igloos
and ice