e is a bulletin
published at stated intervals showing the state of the cotton industry
in the United States. Then there is all the statistical work on cities
of over 30,000 inhabitants, and there is scarcely a question which has
reference to the population or the manufacturing interests of the
country that is not referred sooner or later to the Bureau of the
Census."

"You work with the Forest Service, too, I believe," said Hamilton.
"Wilbur Loyle, a forest ranger whom I knew very well, showed me some
figures that the Bureau had prepared."

"Only in the collection and publication of statistics of forest
products," said Barnes, rising and changing his office coat,--for the
conversation had run on long after office hours,--"owing to their
co-operation the task is not cumbersome; questions of information or
special statistics asked for by Congress or by the executive departments
take up a great deal of time when added to an already extensive routine
work."

Editing the schedules of the population of Alaska, just as Hamilton had
expected, proved to be of the most intense interest, since, despite the
closest desire on the part of the enumerators to confine themselves
strictly to official facts, the wildness of the frontier life would
creep in. An example of this was the listing of an Eskimo girl on the
schedule as having "Sun" and "Sea" for her parents with an explanatory
note to the effect that she had been found as a tiny girl upon a heap of
sea moss on the beach. Another was when an enumerator wrote on his
schedule under 'language spoken,' "Some pesky lingo; I know most of
their talk, but this was too much for me and the hut was too strong to
stay in long."

Such comments made it easy to create a picture of the semi-savagery of
the fur-clad fishers on the shores of the Arctic Sea.

Another schedule, one which interested the boy greatly, was that in
which the age of an Indian was described as "200 snows." To try to get
this worked out to the probably true age of 80 or 90 years evidently had
been quite a task. The enumerator wrote:

"This Indian ain't 200 years old. He says he's 200 snows, but I can't
quite figure it out. He says he was 20 snows when he got first woman,
kept her 4 snows, then she go away! He complained that 'he had no
women 4 suns and catch no women 4 snows.' He 'got more woman, keep her 5
snows, then she eat cold (frozen to death). Got no woman 20 snows, she
good woman.' He could not give any clue