This evening they held a
meeting for the natives in camp, and I attended, but it seemed like a
funeral without the friends now "mushing" on the Nome trail.

A woman has come to live at Mellie's, and is a study in beaver coat,
dyed brown hair (which should be grey, according to her age), and with,
it is reported, a bank account of one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, after having lived in Alaska nearly five years. She is called a
good "stampeder," has a pleasant, smiling face, but is usually
designated "notorious."

May tenth: Mollie went out early with Muky, her dog-team and guns, to
escort Ageetuk, Alice and Punni Churah, with their mother, who is
Mollie's aunt, to their new hunting camp in the mountains. At seven in
the evening Mollie returned with wet feet. Tomorrow she will take a net,
and some other things they have forgotten. They have gone to take their
annual spring vacation and hunt grey squirrels for a month, living in a
hut in the meantime. The weather is warm and springlike.

May thirteenth: The captain has been obliged to go to Nome on business,
weak and ill though he is, and has been for months. It did not seem to
me that he could live through the winter, and he is far too weak to take
this long trip over the trail, but he says he is obliged to go, and will
return at the earliest possible moment. He has taken Fred, the Russian
boy, and a team of nine dogs, leaving after supper, and intending to
travel night and day, as we now have no darkness.

The dissipated men around camp, idle and drunken most of the time, with
nothing to occupy their attention after the long, tedious winter, still
spend their hours in gossiping, swearing, drinking, and gambling,
knowing no day and no night, but making both hideous to those around
them. As a destroyer of man's self-respect, independence, and dignity,
there is nothing to compare with the accursed liquor. There are numbers
of instances in camp proving the truth of this statement. There is the
English clergyman's tall and handsome son, well educated, musical and of
agreeable manners--fitted to grace the best society, but--liquor is to
blame for his present condition, which is about as low as man can sink.

It is ten in the evening and I am in my little room upstairs, the only
white woman in the camp except Mellie and two like her. Down stairs in
the bar-room the men are singing, first coon songs and then church
hymns, with all the drunken energy they can muster. Th