Then Jock told Uncle Cyrus, and after many weeks of gestures and signs, and a frequent use of names and maps and savage localities, at last a rough map was draughted, upon which, at a seemingly clearly indicated point, according to Hungry Wolf's directions, silver would be found.

"And there, Bessie, you have my secret, my long cherished plan," Uncle Cyrus said to his sister. "You know I once spent a summer among those mountains, and I know that the country is full of gold and silver. I am of no use here; Ruthven is amply able to direct and care for everything, and we must make money faster. Before you know it, the girls and boys will be too old to go to school, and they are worthy something better than roughing their lives out on this ranch. Here is the chance for us to become independent and regain all you have lost. Here is wealth in our grasp. My plan has always been for Waldo and myself.

"Never!" Mrs. Frierson broke in, indignantly; "never, so far as Waldo is concerned! If you tempt my boy to go off there with you, I tell you frankly, Cyrus, I shall never forgive you!"

"Very well," he said at last, "Waldo shall not go with me. But go I must. There is nothing I can do here. I am as certain of finding silver as I am sure of my own existence. Let me succeed and you will forgive me. But go I must!"

And go he did. He joined a party of prospectors bound for some of the other mining districts in Arizona. But Waldo remained behind, almost desperate. He chafed and rebelled at what he called the uneventful monotony of his daily life.

"Another party of men is being made up to go," Ruthven told his mother. "I am afraid that Waldo will run away, if you do not let him join the party. Suppose we risk it and let him go. He will join Uncle Cyrus at once. There is not much danger, and he will never be content until he has made the experiment."

Mrs. Frierson was too sensible a woman not to see how matters were tending. Reluctantly she consented, and rapid preparations were made. Waldo overwhelmed his mother with assurances of how prudent he would be.

And so

And Uncle Cyrus knew that she was in earnest. For a few days he seemed greatly cast down. He had shown the family the map made out in his conferences with old Jock and the Indian, and had been full of enthusiasm.

FIFTH PAPER.

N common with the children of workers all over the world, little Boreas must commence to take his share in the family toil as soon as he is old enough to learn and strong enough to do. Most of the sports of the boys are, in fact, such as will enable them to learn something that will be useful later in life, such as playing with the young dogs, harnessing and driving them, shooting with the bow and arrow, and throwing the lance at live animals. The girls, also, in making their dolls, learn to sew and to make coats and other garments of reindeer skin, and boots and shoes of sealskin leather.

When the men have very nearly finished building the igloo, the boys are expected to take the big, broad wooden shovel, described in my first article, and throw the loose snow against the sides of the igloo; for between the blocks of snow will be many "chinks" and crevices that would let in a great deal of cold air, if not stopped up. Besides throwing on this loose, soft snow about two feet deep, the boys have still another way of "chinking." Little Boreas, with the snow-knife in his right hand, cuts from the upper edge of the block, in the joint which is to be "chinked" a thin slice of snow, and with his left fist doubled up rams it into the joint between the blocks, his left fist keeping a constant punching as the knife runs slowly along the edge of the joint.

Of course, during the first three or four courses of blocks, the boys (and sometimes the girls) can

"chink" the joints while they are standing or kneeling on the ground; but after it gets above and beyond the reach of their arms, they have to crawl on top of the house, which looks so frail that you are almost certain the little fellows will tumble through the thin snow walls of the hut. But when it is completed and made of good snow, three or four big men can go on top of it, so much stronger is it than it appears to be. Sometimes, however, the boys are surprised and disappointed; for, when the snow is soft, or happens to be full of sand or little specks of ice, they come tumbling through the top of the igloo, generally on the heads of those who are making the bed or setting up the lamp inside of the house; and then the igloo has to be built all over again. Fortunately, however, these

cases are of rare occurrence.

Sometimes, in very cold weather, the boys will both "chink" and "bank" the igloo (banking being the covering with loose snow), and then, with a small lamp, it is quite easy to heat up the little snow house to a comfortable temperature; but this, you remember, must never rise to the point where snow melts, or the house will come tumbling in on their heads. After Boreas's father has cut enough snow blocks to go two or three times around the igloo, if there is no other man in the party, he will tell Boreas to cut the rest; and the lad generally manages to furnish his father with enough blocks to complete the house.

After the igloo is finished, the bedding of reindeer skins is taken from the sledge; but before these go in-doors, the snow that has worked into them (especially if there has been a strong wind

during the day) must be beaten off with a snowstick; and this comparatively light work generally falls to the children, unless there is a great hurry to get into shelter from some terrible wind, in which case all the party turn to and work with a will.

When the house is finished, Boreas must see that the dogs are unharnessed and turned loose. The seal-skin harness, which the dogs would eat if in their usual hungry condition, must be put inside the snow house or fastened to the top of a tall pole, stuck upright in the snow, so that the dogs can not reach it.

In the morning, when the dogs are needed for the day's work, the boys have to scamper around with two or three harnesses in their hands, catch and harness the dogs, hitch them to the sledge, and then start out after another lot. It frequently happens that some particular dog takes an especial delight in giving his catchers just as much trouble as he possibly can. As soon as he sees that the other dogs are being harnessed, he will trot away to the top of some high ridge, and coolly sitting down,

ways noticed that, like spoiled children, they invariably go from bad to worse, until finally their master becomes so angry that he ties one of the dog's forefeet to its body every night, so that he will have no trouble in catching the would-be runaway on the next morning.

The dogs are also used in various ways in hunting. When the weather is so foggy that Boreas's father can not see very far, and there is consequently but little prospect of killing anything unless the hunter almost stumbles upon it, the father will take his bow and arrows, or his gun, if he be fortunate enough to own one, and giving the best-trained hunting-dog in charge of Boreas himself, they start out reindeer-hunting. Boreas puts a harness on the dog, ties the trace around his own waist, or holds it in his hands, and follows his father out into the fog.

Of course, the older Eskimo has some idea of where the reindeer will be grazing or resting, and he soon finds out which way the wind is blowing over the place where he suspects the reindeer to

that it shall not run away. As soon as the dog scents the deer, it goes directly toward them, and when it is quite near, it grows excited, and commences to jump and to jerk the harness-trace by which Boreas is holding it; being a well-trained hunting-dog, however, it never barks so as to frighten the deer by the sound.

Boreas's father now knows from these excited actions of the dog that the reindeer must be close at hand, although he can not see them for the fog. So he tells Boreas to hold the dog and remain in that spot while he takes his bow or gun and crawls cautiously forward in the proper direction. Before he has gone far, probably not more than twenty or twenty-five yards away, the huge forms of two or three reindeer loom up through the fog. If he is a good hunter he will at least bring one down, and perhaps two or three of them, and so have something for supper. When there is snow on the ground, the boy will generally take two or three dogs along, and after a reindeer is killed, will use them to drag it into the snow house. As Boreas loves excitement, this is good sport, and in this way he soon learns to hunt quite well.

The ice on the ocean forms from six to ten feet thick, and through this deep ice the seals manage to scratch a hole to the top, and then form a little igloo in the foot or two of snow that usually covers the ice. In the top of this little snow dome is an opening as large as your two fingers; and to this

the dog will scent a seal-hole a hundred yards away, and will lead the hunter to it. As it is very uncertain just how long he will have to wait for the seals, the hunter proceeds at once to cut out two or three blocks of snow to make a comfortable seat on which to rest and wait. As I have already said, the seal breathes, or "blows," as it is called, every fifteen or twenty minutes; but oftentimes he is traveling, and each time comes up to a different hole to blow. It is possible, too, that he may hear or smell the hunter or his dog,-for seals are very timid animals, in fact, there are many reasons why the hole may not be visited by a seal for a long time, and after watching for a whole day, the hunter may have to leave the place, unrewarded. Where the natives, as is often the case, have been almost starving, owing to the scarcity of seals and other game on which they live, the best and most patient seal-hunters have been known to sit for two or three days at one hole watching vigilantly for a seal's nose. But, however long it may be before "pussy” (as the seals are sometimes called) comes around to breathe a little whiff of fresh air, as soon as the first "blow" is heard by the hunter, who is, perhaps, half asleep, he is at once full of expectation and excitement. He places the point of his sealspear close to the "blow-hole," and by the time 'pussy" has taken two or three whiffs she is astonished by a sudden thrust of the spear crushing through the dome of snow; the cruel barb on

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igloo the seal comes, about every quarter of an hour, to breathe. When he puts his nose close to the little hole at the top of the dome for some fresh air, he breathes in a series of short gasps that any one near the hole can readily hear. These holes are so small that even the close-observing Eskimo hunters, while walking over miles of ice-fields, could easily pass them by without observing them. But if there is a dog along, as in reindeerhunting, and if the wind is in the right direction, and a seal has been breathing recently in the igloo,

the spear-point catches into her flesh underneath the skin, and the hunter draws her to the top of the ice, crushes in the snow with his heavy heel, and then kills the captured seal.

Sometimes the mother seal seeks a breathinghole under the deepest snow and makes a much larger dome, so that the ice will form a shelf two or three feet in width. Here the little "kittens," or baby seals, spend their time until they are big enough to try to swim with their mother and learn to care for themselves. Here, too, she brings

them food, and when disturbed, hurries away, leaving her kittens on their ice shelf, where they are safe from harm, because they are of the same color as the snow and, therefore, can not be seen by the wolf or bear who is out seal-hunting. The Eskimo, however, when he comes to one of these igloos, has an instrument like a long knitting needle, which he sticks in through the blow-hole, and, working it around, soon finds out whether any babies are to be kidnapped from Mother Seal's snow house.

After little Boreas's father has gone into camp, and while he is building his snow house, the boys of the party go to work to dig a hole through the ice on the fresh-water lake, near where the camp is built, in order to get fresh water, with which to cook supper. The first thing necessary is to select a good spot for the well, which is generally about a foot and a half or two feet in diameter, and from four to eight and ten feet deep, depending, of course, upon the thickness of the ice.

But, before they begin to dig, the boys fling themselves down on the ice, even flattening their noses hard against it, so as to bring their eyes as close to it as possible. From some peculiarity

in the color and appearance of the ice they can judge as to there being water underneath it, for there is nothing so disappointing, after having dug the well five or six feet down, as to find lumps of ice coming up full of mud or sand, showing that the bottom is dry. The boys, however, seldom make a mistake in their observations, although now and then they will get "fooled" about it, and will find that they have spent a quarter of an hour's hard work for nothing.

The deeper the snow has drifted on the ice the thinner the ice will be, as the snow protects it during the intense cold, just as in our climate the deep snow protects the delicate plants on the ground, and keeps them from being killed by the coldest weather. And as it is so much easier to shovel off the soft snow than to dig through the hard ice, the boys always look for a deep snow-drift very near to the spot where they have peered through the ice and seen clear water beneath. If they can get near a crack that extends entirely through the ice, it will also make it much easier to dig the well, as one side is thus already prepared for them.

Having selected as favorable a place as possible,