In that awful pause Mary Shepherd glanced at the doctor. He was looking at her, and, his hand shielding his mouth at one side, he silently pronounced a

name.

Blushing, she repeated it. She would have repeated it if he had said Four Corners.

"Spell phthysic," said the school-committee-man monotonously, looking at his thumbs.

Mary spelt the ridiculous word with a radiant smile. Good-bye, populations! And yet there were certain words which she never could be quite sure of rightly spelling.

But the deacon gave her no further spelling trial. He probably thought that a person who can spell phthysic can spell anything.

"How wide is the Amazon river at its mouth?" he asked; and a downward movement of the thumbs seemed to indicate that this was the final question.

The teacher's heart and her ideas expanded at the sign. "Three hundred and sixty miles!" she answered with recovered stateliness.

The first class in geography began to giggle. Was not that very question in the lesson of the day?

Deacon Heath looked at the teacher with doubt and surprise in his face. "I thought that it was only one hundred and fifty miles wide," he said.

"Oh!" the doctor put in eagerly, "You are both right. Some friends of mine have just returned from the Amazon. At a certain point the mouth is only one hundred and fifty miles wide, but just outside of that it is three hundred and sixty."

The mistress gave one brief glance at his laughing eyes, and averted her own. He, having thus rescued her, turned a fierce look upon the first class in geo

The deacon, slightly disconcerted, asked no more questions, but set himself laboriously to write a certificate that Miss Mary Shepherd was qualified to teach the district (he called it deestric) school in the town of Beechland. Having presented this paper to the teacher, he rose to go, the children all rising with him. He had meant to make an address; but the slight mortification he suffered changed his mind. It would not do to risk his supremacy a second time.

"Be you going to stay here a few days longer?" he asked, in taking leave of the doctor, who had offered his hand.

Always impressionable, and at that moment absorbed in listening to a soft sigh of relief breathed out in his hearing, the doctor replied, "I be! then fell to coughing.

Miss Shepherd became radiant as soon as the deacon was fairly outside the door. Her trial safely over, for the first time the stranger within her gates saw her as she was. She was modest, self-possessed, full of a soft energy, white, sound, and soulful. Withal, a young woman not given to foolish laughter, but capable of assuming a very imposing dignity.

The doctor went out, and found the deacon waiting for him. "I suppose it's nigh on to twelve o'clock," he remarked, putting a thumb and fore-finger into his empty watch-pocket.

"It is a quarter past twelve," the doctor said.

"Sho!" said the deacon; and went reluctantly away, promising to go over the doctor's farm with him that afternoon.

"I'll marry that girl, if I have to carry her off by force!" the doctor said to himself excitedly, as he walked up and down waiting for the teacher to

come out.

The boys came out, shouting as soon as their feet were on the turf, and the girls came more soberly after with their dinner-baskets or pails. They scattered about to eat their dinners. Some climbed

a great mossy boulder as high as the school-house. Others seated themselves on a low rock overhung by a witch-hazel tree; and others on a bank dotted with tiny yellow violets by the thread of a brook at the road-side. Three little barefooted

ones, with their toes turned in, sat on the door-step, and ate doughnuts and cheese.

The mistress came out, tying on a white muslin sun-bonnet. She had been thinking of her visitor, how bright, strong and helpful he was. She liked doctors. How they all loved their dear old doctor in Shepherdsville ! How often he had soothed their fears, and changed their anguish to joy! How many a time they had run, terrified, to call him, day or night, especially for mother, and hung trembling on his looks and words when he came ! How their sick ones turned to look at the door by which he was to enter!

They liked him better than they liked the minister, with whom they did not feel at ease. He used to ask them if they loved God; and they did not know whether they loved Him or not, and had to maintain an awkward silence, or say "I dunno!" in an imbecile way. Jack Shepherd always used to run his tongue out at this question, not from disrespect, but from sheer inability to use that or gan in any other way.

Miss Mary Shepherd was now twenty years of age, and a very intelligent young woman; but she still shrank a little

Oh! the sweet laugh! How it made the birds turn their heads to see what new songster was at hand! "Of course, I knew better!" she said, her head drooping till only the tip of her pretty nose was visible beyond her sun-bonnet.

"Oh, well!" the doctor said, consolingly, "it's all over now; and I'm sure you are glad that it is."

"I be!" retorted the school-mistress slyly; and the sun-bonnet turned just far enough to show her whole profile for an instant, with a flash of gold from the hair and a swift soft beam from the clear gray eye.

S

KIRTING the rim of the great Arctic Ocean with its area about equal to that of the United States, are to be found several savage communities differing in racial, tribal and other ethnographic elements; and to describe those which are confined to the American continent, or the American Arctic savage, is the object of this article.

While Lapland and Siberia give a number of different tribes having no common language, customs, etc., as the Lapps, Samoyedes, Tchukchees, and others, it is a somewhat singular fact that the American continent gives but one, the Eskimo, although its length of Arctic coast-line is nearly equal to that of the eastern hemisphere, making up in sinuosities almost what it lacks in longitudinal spread. Where the mighty Mackenzie River sweeps into the Arctic, and Alaska's noblest stream, the Yukon, just tips the circle of that zone, both watercourses carry with them the American Indian for a very short distance within the polar regions; but to where this race occupies a mile along the polar parts of these rivers, the Eskimo extends a hundred miles beyond the Arctic circle into the temperate zone. In fact no savage race in the world, or within historic times, has spread over and held such a vast extent of territory as the Eskimo. And yet this vastness, reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and facing both those great bodies of water, is insignificant in depth, being merely the coast-line which stretches from one ocean to the other around the northern part of America, and from which the Eskimo dare not depart any distance, as from the sea come three-fourths of the sus tenance he manages to wrest from a niggardly nature. From half-way down the cheerless, ice-bound coast of Labrador (once beyond the straits of Belle Isle), the Eskimo is found in straggling numbers and interrupted intervals

along the shore of the northern Atlantic, northern Hudson's Bay, all the Arctic Ocean, the American side of Bering's Sea and the Pacific Ocean to about the mouth of the Copper River of Alaskafrom the St. Lawrence to St. Elias.

Politically the Eskimo are under four flags of civilized powers, those of Greenland owing Danish allegiance, the British cross of St. George being over all to Alaska, where our own stars and stripes occasionally greet their sight, while a very few that have found a foothold on the nearest Asian shores are under the great White Czar. Yet with this vast longitudinal stretch of country encompassed, I doubt if all the Eskimo of America would outnumber many of our western Indian tribes which find their homes within much narrower limits of territory.

Why human beings have been found living in this lone land of desolation has given rise to no little theorizing and speculation, the bulk of which seems to be that they are cruelly forced to abide here by the supposed greater strength of the savages to the south of them. My own ideas are with the "respectable minority" which believes that they are found in these regions for the same reasons that we find the reindeer, the musk-ox, and the walrus; that is, it suits their peculiar temperament and disposition better than any other climate or condition possibly could, and they are no more forced into the frigid zone by other savages than the animals named are held there by the antelope, buffalo, or caribou of lower latitudes. When they are taken from their Hyperborean home they are as restless to return as the castaways in their own land are to get back to civilization, and singular enough, despite all their desolate surroundings, they are the most happy and contented race, savage or civilized, in the four corners of the earth; although it is the coldest corner. The tale told by Captain Hall of the deep longing of the sick and sinking Eskimo, Kudlago, to see his land of ice and snow before he

died, and his joy on being carried to the deck of the Arctic-bound ship when the first iceberg was sighted, is as pathetic as any ever told of the return of Arctic refugees to their land of flowers and for ests; and clearly shows that patriotism and love of home is circumscribed by no parallels of latitude nor influenced by climatic conditions. Wherever the Indians and Eskimo have come in contact in an aggressive way, the northern nomads have steadily pushed back their copper-colored neighbors, and the only places where they the Eskimo-have penetrated far inland to reside, is along the Yukon and Kouskoquim Rivers of Alaska. Here they have elbowed out the Indian for some hundreds of miles, and find a luxuriant living on the swarming fisheries of these streams.

It has been urged by some scientists, with no small degree of ingenious reasoning that the prehistoric cavemen of Europe were the progenitors of the present widely dispersed Eskimo race. At that time much of Europe was overspread by a huge sheet of ice (the glacial epoch of geology) and along its edges a hardy race of people hunted the reindeer and lived in caves. Being a cold-climate-loving race they followed the ice-sheet as it retreated northward until the Arctic Ocean stopped their polar pilgrimage. Then they followed its flat coast east and west until they came to mountainous

country where elevation gave them the cold denied by northern migration, and they stopped in the hilly land of the northern Scandinavian peninsula where the Lapps live, and in the Arctic coast of America, much of which is high and precipitous.

The Eskimo, the Lapps, and ancient cavemen have many points in common. They are nearly all small in stature, while, more important from a scientific standpoint, their crania are so similar as to point to a common origin. The Eskimo are noted for their love of rude sculpture with and drawing on walrus ivory, reindeer horns, and such materials as their lone land furnishes, and this primitive art is found among the relics of the European cavemen; one engraving on a reindeer horn of the prehistoric mammoth exciting a deep interest as showing that that huge animal was contemporaneous with man before history was begun, except by such fragmentary links as this very engraving recorded.

While the Eskimo undoubtedly are a short-statured and small race of people, a two years' residence with them on the Atlantic side and a summer's experience among them on the Pacific coast has convinced me that they are not of such a pygmy growth as popular belief pictures them; and this has been spoken of before by some who have had extended contact with them. One tribe I saw, in fact,