s well as head-gear; moreover, there is
always a certain perspiration that condenses. One gets into the habit of
turning the duffel lining of the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging
them up the moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house stove
there is a rack constructed for just that purpose.

There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic trail than the
behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As one approaches a road-house, and
to greater degree a village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist,
although there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect in
every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is not mist at all; it is
merely the smoke from the stovepipes. And the explanation is simple,
although not all at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer
than the air into which it is discharged; for that and no other reason.
Now, when smoke is discharged into air at a temperature of 50 deg. below
zero, it is deprived of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by
its greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed just issuing
from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and then curling downward to be
diffused amidst the air near the ground.

It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled up to warm and
refresh ourselves and our team for the twenty miles that remained of the
day's march. We had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise late in the season
finding water too shallow for transport to the diggings, there is more
or less freighting with dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel
keeps open the road-houses on the route. From an "outside" point of view
they may appear rough and the fare coarse. The night accommodation is a
double row of bunks on each side of a long room with a great stove in
the middle. Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes spruce
boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed mattresses. But
to the weary traveller, who has battled with the storm or endured the
intense cold for hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge;
they are often even life-saving stations.

[Sidenote: METEOROLOGICAL]

While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded and the thermometer
rose. This is an unfailing sequence. Clear, bright weather is cold
weather; cloudy weather is warm weather. The usual explanation, that the
cloud acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of he