--that was her name--and found her company
always pleasant and her conversation agreeable. I went fishing with her,
but not in her perilous boat: I merely followed along on the ice and
watched her strike her game with her fatally accurate spear. We went
sealing together; several times I stood by while she and the family dug
blubber from a stranded whale, and once I went part of the way when she
was hunting a bear, but turned back before the finish, because at bottom
I am afraid of bears.

However, she was ready to begin her story, now, and this is what she
said:

'Our tribe had always been used to wander about from place to place over
the frozen seas, like the other tribes, but my father got tired of that,
two years ago, and built this great mansion of frozen snow-blocks--look
at it; it is seven feet high and three or four times as long as any of
the others--and here we have stayed ever since. He was very proud of his
house, and that was reasonable, for if you have examined it with care
you must have noticed how much finer and completer it is than houses
usually are. But if you have not, you must, for you will find it has
luxurious appointments that are quite beyond the common. For instance,
in that end of it which you have called the "parlour," the raised
platform for the accommodation of guests and the family at meals is the
largest you have ever seen in any house--is it not so?'

'Yes, you are quite right, Lasca; it is the largest; we have nothing
resembling it in even the finest houses in the United States.' This
admission made her eyes sparkle with pride and pleasure. I noted that,
and took my cue.

'I thought it must have surprised you,' she said. 'And another thing;
it is bedded far deeper in furs than is usual; all kinds of furs--seal,
sea-otter, silver-grey fox, bear, marten, sable--every kind of fur in
profusion; and the same with the ice-block sleeping-benches along the
walls which you call "beds." Are your platforms and sleeping-benches
better provided at home?'

'Indeed, they are not, Lasca--they do not begin to be.' That pleased
her again. All she was thinking of was the number of furs her aesthetic
father took the trouble to keep on hand, not their value. I could have
told her that those masses of rich furs constituted wealth--or would in
my country--but she would not have understood that; those were not the
kind of things that ranked as riches with her people. I could have
told her that the clothes