ng bride having been carried off, flashed upon me, and I
had no doubt that the Esquimau girl now stood before me. Indeed, the
fact of the broken exclamations uttered by the pair being in the
Esquimau tongue put this beyond a doubt. A feeling of great delight
filled my heart as I looked upon the couple thus unexpectedly reunited;
while they, quite oblivious of my presence, poured out a flood of
question and reply, in the midst of which they ever and anon embraced,
to make sure, no doubt, of their physical identity. Then it suddenly
occurred to me that I was behaving very ill, so I wheeled about and
sauntered away to a little distance in the direction of the shore, in
order to take some astronomical observations of the sky, and gaze
inquiringly up at the moon, which at that moment broke through a bank of
clouds, tipping the icebergs on the sea and the branches of the
overhanging trees with silver light.

"In quarter of an hour Maximus came to me and presented his long-lost
bride, Aneetka, whose pretty face beamed with joy, while her lover's
frame appeared to expand with felicity until he looked like an
exaggerated Hercules. But we had no time to waste in talking of the
past. The present required our instant and earnest attention; so we sat
down on the stem of a fallen tree to consult as to how we were to get
Aneetka out of the hands of her Indian captors. Her brief history,
after she was captured at Ungava, was as follows:--

"The Indian who had intended to make her his bride found her resolved
rather to die than to marry him; but hoping that time would overcome her
objection, he placed her under the care of his widowed mother, Old
Moggy, on returning to his village in the interior. Soon afterwards
this Indian was killed by a brown bear, and the poor mother became a
sort of outcast from the tribe, having no relations to look after her.
She was occasionally assisted, however, by two youths, who came to sue
for the hand of the Esquimau girl. But Aneetka, true to her first love,
would not listen to their proposals. One of these lovers was absent on
a hunting expedition at the time we discovered Aneetka; the other, a
surly fellow, and disliked by the most of his comrades, was in the camp.
From the day of her son's death, a feeling of sympathy had sprung up
between Old Moggy and the Esquimau girl, and this had gradually
strengthened into affection.

"Thus matters stood when we fell in with her. After much deliberat