an abrupt
termination.

Edith had been amusing herself in her house of ice all the morning with
her adopted baby, and was in the act of feeding it with a choice morsel
of seal-fat, partially cooked, to avoid doing violence to her own
prejudices, and very much under-done in order to suit the Esquimau
baby's taste--when Peetoot rushed violently into the hut, shouted Eeduck
with a boisterous smile, seized the baby in his arms, and carried it off
to its mother. Edith was accustomed to have it thus torn from her by
the boy, who was usually sent as a messenger when Kaga happened to
desire the loan of her offspring.

The igloo in which Kaga and her relations dwelt was the largest in the
village. It was fully thirty feet in diameter. The passage leading to
it was a hundred yards long, by five feet wide and six feet high, and
from this passage branched several others of various lengths, leading to
different storehouses and to other dwellings. The whiteness of the snow
of which this princely mansion and its offices were composed was not
much altered on the exterior; but in the interior a long winter of
cooking and stewing and general filthiness had turned the walls and
roofs quite black. Being somewhat lazy, Peetoot preferred the old plan
of walking over this palace to going round by the entrance, which faced
the south. Accordingly, he hoisted the fat and smiling infant on his
shoulder, and bounded over the dome-shaped roof of Kaga's igloo. Alas
for the result of disobedience! No sooner had his foot touched the
key-stone of the arch than down it went. Dinner was being cooked and
consumed by twenty people below at the time. The key-stone buried a
joint of walrus-beef, and instantly Peetoot and the baby lay sprawling
on the top of it. But this was not all. The roof, unable to support
its own weight, cracked and fell in with a dire crash. The men, women,
and children struggled to disentomb themselves, and in doing so mixed up
the oil of the lamps, the soup of their kettles, the black soot of the
walls and roof, the dogs that had sneaked in, the junks of cooked,
half-cooked, and raw blubber, and their own hairy-coated persons, into a
conglomerate so atrocious to behold, or even think upon, that we are
constrained to draw a curtain over the scene and spare the reader's
feelings. This event caused the Esquimaux to forsake the igloos, and
pitch their skin tents on a spot a little to the southward of their
wintering groun