Everything in and around the hamlet bore evidence of peace and thrift.
It was a settlement of Norsemen--the _first_ Greenland settlement,
established by Eric the Red of Iceland about the year 986--nearly twenty
years before the date of the opening of our tale--and the hairy
creatures above referred to had gone there to look at it.

Having gazed very intently over the ridge for a considerable time, they
crept backwards with extreme caution, and, on getting sufficiently far
down the hill-side to be safe from observation, rose on their hind-legs
and began to talk; from which circumstance it may be concluded that they
were human beings. After talking, grinning, and glaring at each other
for a few minutes, with gestures to correspond, as though on the point
of engaging in mortal combat, they suddenly wheeled about and walked off
at a rapid pace in the direction of a gorge in the mountains, the head
of which was shut in by and filled up with cliffs and masses and fields
of ice that overtopped the everlasting hills, and rested like a white
crest on the blue sky. Vast though it seemed, this was merely a tongue
of those great glaciers of the mysterious North which have done, and are
still doing, so much to modify the earth's economy and puzzle
antiquarian philosophy; which form the fountain-head of influences that
promote the circulation of the great deep, and constitute the cradle of
those ponderous icebergs that cover the arctic seas.

From out that gloomy gorge a band of more than a hundred hairy creatures
issued with wild shouts and upraised arms to welcome back the
adventurous two. They surrounded them, and forthwith the nation--for
the entire nation was evidently there--held a general assembly or
parliament on the spot. There was a good deal of uproar and confusion
in that parliament, with occasional attempts on the part of several
speakers to obtain a hearing at one and the same time--in which respects
this parliament bore some resemblance to civilised assemblies of the
present day. There was also an immense amount of gesticulation and
excitement.

At last there uprose a man clad in garments that had once belonged to a
seal, and with a face that was quite as round and nearly as flat as a
frying-pan. He stood fully half a foot higher than the tallest of his
fellows. Like the adventurous two he had a tail--a very short tail--to
his coat; but indeed this might be said of all the men of the tribe.
The women's tai