of snow, are shown, and the little circular windows you see are also thin sheets of ice, which let in the light quite as well as our own at home, although not nearly so much light, because they are very much smaller than our windows.

Before these houses get covered inside with the black soot from the burning lamps, and before the snow outside has drifted up level with the roof, a night scene in a village of ice, and especially if the village be a large one and all the lamps be burning brilliantly, is one of the prettiest views a stranger can find in that desolate land. If you could behold a village of cabins suddenly transformed into houses of glass, and filled with burning lamps, it might represent an Eskimo ice-village at night.

As you will see by the picture, we took our sum

lumps of it from the top of the barrel, and brought it in and put it over the fire, where it soon melted, so that we could use it. One day he left the hatchet on the frozen syrup, and when he needed it a few hours later, it was gone. Its disappearance was a great mystery, as the Eskimo never stole, and could not get into the tent in any case. The mystery, however, was cleared up the next day, when an iron bar with which he had been splintering off some of the frozen mass was left in the barrel, and we found that it sank in the frozen syrup until only the end stuck out. And when we had cut it all out, we found the hatchet below, at the bottom. It seemed as absurd as to leave an axe on a frozen lake and to see it slowly sink through three or four feet of ice to the bottom. We built no other house for ourselves than this

long visit to some whale-ships that were frozen in a harbor about a hundred miles farther south. There were four of these ships in a safe little harbor jutting into the shore of Marble Island, and the way they prepare themselves for the long Arctic winter is shown in the picture on page 865. In the fall of the year, just before it gets so cold that the ice forms, they huddle together, as you see them in the illustration, and each ship puts down two anchors, one at the bow and one at the stern, and these hold them from striking against the shore or one another until the ice forms around them and freezes them in solidly. Then the anchors and rudders are taken up, and, with lumber which they have brought from home, the whalers build a rude but substantial house over the ship, as you see in the picture. Then they get the Eskimo to build a sort of snow-house or igloo over the wooden house again, and, so, with all this covering to protect them, they manage to keep warm and comfortable with very little fire, however cold it may be out-of-doors. Sometimes they put in double windows, the inside ones of glass, as usual, and the outside ones being made of slabs of ice, like the curious windows of the igloos. The white men do not live in the temporary houses you see, built on top of the ships, but in the cabin and forecastle, just as if they were cruising out to sea. The house is simply put over the ship to keep the real places warm, and right well it does its work. This "house," however, is very useful as a place for taking exercise, for ship-carpentering work, and for any small jobs that may be necessary. The

Eskimo also congregate there, especially about meal-time; and the more generous whalers feed them with a little hard sea-bread and weak tea well sweetened with molasses, and for this the natives supply them with reindeer and walrus meat, and build the snow-houses over their ships.

But you must not think that all ships in the Arctic winters fare so well as those I have just described. The whalers visit the polar regions nearly every winter, and know by experience how to be comfortable when there. Where they find whales they almost always find Eskimo, and the natives are of great assistance to them, as I have said. Many explorers, however, push beyond these limits, and we are constantly reading of their useless sufferings while in winter-quarters from not knowing how to properly shield and maintain themselves.

While in the fall, the whalers patiently wait for the ice to form, so as to house themselves in, they do not in the spring wait for the ice to melt before getting to work at catching whales that are sporting on the outside of the still frozen harbors; so they cut a channel, wide enough for the ship, through the ice from the open water to alongside the vessel, and she is then floated out. In the harbor at Marble Island, the channel, through ice five or six feet thick, came up between the four ships where you see the sledge-track in the picture. The work of cutting a channel only half a mile long, occupied three weeks, each crew working six hours, night and day. But, as you probably know already, the night is as light as the day, in the Arctic spring.

ON the opposite page is a copy of a curious drawing which will interest young folk of a mechanical turn of mind; and it has, moreover, a bit of a story connected with it. Sixty years ago a young draughtsman in Philadelphia, who devoted himself entirely to making drawings to accompany applications for patents, wished for something besides his small sign, to attract the attention of inventors to his office. So he drew a strange combination of the mechanical contrivances of that day, in a form to represent a human head, and gave it the inscription: "The Inventor's Head." This drawing, neatly executed in India ink, the young artist placed in his office win

dow, with the words, "Drawings and Specifications for Patents," printed in bold, large letters beneath it.

The figure here shown is an exact copy of the drawing, and the following is a list of the articles that compose the Inventor's Head:

The nose is a carpenter's try-square; the cheek, a basket; the jaw, a blacksmith's tongs; the chin, the end of a shaft; the forehead, a roll, which, working against another in the temple, produces a scroll of iron for the ear; the brain, or knowledgebox, is as old as the world, and so that is, as you see, a globe; the ruffled shirt-bosom is made of a jig-saw and a pinion-rack; the still-worm makes