from near and far intent upon the festival in both of its aspects,
religious and social, and they enter so heartily into all that is
provided for them that one does not know which to admire most, their
simple, earnest piety or the whole-hearted enthusiasm of their sports
and pastimes. Right out of church they go to the frozen river, old men
and maidens, young men and matrons, mothers with babies on their backs
and their skirts tucked up, and they quickly line up and are kicking the
football stuffed with moose hair and covered with moose hide in the
native game that their forefathers played ages before "Rugby" was
invented.[B] When the church-bell rings, back they all troop again, to
take their places and listen patiently and reverently to the long,
double-interpreted service, the babies still on their mothers' backs,
sometimes asleep, sometimes waking up and crying, comforted by slinging
them round and applying their lips to the fountain of nourishment and
solace.

On the nights when there is no church service there is feasting and
dancing. The native dance is a very simple affair, entirely without any
objectionable feature, and one cannot see any reason in the world for
attempting to suppress it. A man and a woman get out in the middle of
the floor and dance opposite one another without touching at all. The
moccasined toes of an expert man in this dance move with surprising
rapidity, the woman, with eyes downcast, the picture of demureness,
sways slightly from side to side and moves on her toes in rhythm to the
man's movement. Presently another man jumps up and the first man yields
his place; then another woman comes forward and the first woman yields
her place, and so the dance goes on.

For a variety, of late years there is an occasional "white-man's dance,"
of the quadrille or the waltz kind, but the natives much prefer their
own dancing. Here at the Allakaket the presence of the Esquimaux adds
picturesqueness and strangeness, and the Esquimau dance, which consists
of a series of jerky attitudinisings, with every muscle tense, to a
curious monotonous chant and the beating of a drum, is a never-failing
source of amusement to the Indians.

An old man's funeral in the morning away up on the high bluff
overlooking the mission, a birth in the evening, a dance the same
night--so goes the drama of life in this little, isolated native world.
So soon as these people make up their minds that one of their number is
sick un