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A stone, and climbing, looked within. Oh, joy! what sight was seen!
There Täi sat, at supper, with his lovely wife, Amine,

And a group of merry children, laughing hard as children can.

On Tai's left, there sat a smiling rosy faced old man,

Just turning round, his glass in hand, to Tai's health to drink.

With joyful cry leaped Békir down, and, as you well may think,

He did not lose a minute ere upon that door he knocked.

A servant came, but screamed aloud, and ran back, scared and shocked.
But Täi knew his brothers, and embraced them o'er and o'er;

And clothed their shivering forms, and led them, glad, within the door,
And brought the children one by one to kiss them all around,
And proudly showed the sweet Amine." Ah, brother, you have found
True happiness," cried Békir. "We have always wretched been;
And as for that Bathmendi,' him we have not even seen."

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Next day, glad Täi showed his brothers all his flocks and fields;
And told them all the happiness a life of farming yields.
Békir desired to try his hand at work that very day;

He was the first Bathmendi loved. The rest, by slower way,
Won his regard. Mesrou head shepherd of the flocks became.
The poet Sadder sold the wool, and won no little fame
By eloquence to customers.- So all their days sped on,
And, ere the year was out, all three Bathmendi's love had won.

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They say a fable is but poor that leaveth aught to guess;

But I, perhaps, have made this dull, and hurt it more or less.

So I will add, "Bathmendi" means, in Persian, "Happiness."

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THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD.*

THIRD PAPER.

BY LIEUT. FREDERICK SCHWATKA.

ONE of the first toys that little Boreas has is a small bow of whalebone or light wood; and sitting on the end of the snow bed he shoots his toy arrows, under the direction of his father or mother or some one who cares to play with him, at something on the other side of the snow house. This is usually a small piece of boiled meat, of which he is very fond, stuck in a crack between the snow blocks; and if he hits it, he is entitled to eat it as a reward, although little Boreas seldom needs such encouragement to stimulate him in his plays, so lonesome and long are the dreary winter days in which he lives buried beneath the snow.

These toy arrows are pointed with pins; but he is also furnished with blunt arrows, and whenever some inquisitive dog pokes his head in the igloo door, looking around for a stray piece of meat or blubber to steal, little Boreas, if he shoots straight, will hit him upon the nose or head with one of the blunt arrows, and the dog will beat a hasty retreat. In this sense, the little Eskimo boy has plenty of targets to shoot at, for the igloo door is nearly always filled with the heads of two or three dogs watching Boreas's mother closely; and if she turns her head or back for a moment, they will make a rush to steal something, and to get out as soon as possible, before she can pound them over the head with a club that she keeps for that purpose.

In these exciting raids of a half-dozen hungry dogs, little Boreas is liable to get, by all odds, the worst of the encounter. He is too small to be noticed, and the first big dog that rushes by him knocks him over; the next probably rolls him off the bed to the floor; another upsets the lamp full of oil on him; and while he is reeking with oil, another big dog, taking him for a sealskin full of blubber, tries to drag him out, when his mother happens to rescue him after she has accidentally pommeled him two or three times with the club with which she is striking at the dogs; and if it were not for his hideous yelling and crying, one would hardly know what he is, so covered is he with dirt, grease, and snow. Thus the dogs occasionally have their revenge on little Boreas for whacking them over the nose with his toy arrows, although this is not their object in rushing into the igloo, for the real cause is their ravenous hunger. The duty of feeding the dogs is often intrusted to the boys, and it is no easy work. The most VOL. XII.-33.

common food for the dogs is walrus-skin, about an inch to an inch and a half thick, cut in strips each about as wide as it is thick, and from a foot to eighteen inches long. The dog swallows one of these strips as he would a snake; and it is so tough that when he has swallowed about twelve pieces, it is no great wonder that he does not want anything more for two days. Sometimes they cut the food up into little pieces inside the igloo, where the dogs can not trouble them, and then throw it out on the snow; but this is not altogether a good way; for then the little dogs get it all while the big dogs are fighting, for these big burly fellows are sure to have an unnecessary row over each feeding. If pieces too large to swallow at a gulp are thrown out, the large dogs get the food; and so, between the big dogs and the little ones, the Eskimo boys have a hard time making an equal distribution among the animals.

When they are anxious for a fair division, only one dog at a time is let into the igloo, a couple of boys standing at the door with sticks in their hands to prevent the other dogs from entering. When it is pleasant weather out-of-doors, they often build a semicircular wall three or four snow blocks high, and behind this a couple of men cut up the meat, blubber, or walrus-hide, and allow but one dog at a time to come in, three or four boys with long whips, their lashes fifteen or twenty feet in length, standing near the open part of the wall to keep the ravenous pack from making a raid. Once or twice I have known dogs to come bounding over the high wall, crushing in the snow blocks on the men who were chopping the meat, and stealing several pieces before the boys had finished beating the mingled dogs and men with their whips.

One winter night, I remember, while on our sledge-journey, returning to North Hudson's Bay, Toolooah was feeding his dogs, with no one to help him. He was on his knees near the igloo door, and throwing the bits to the various dogs, the heads of which were crowded in the entrance, and he was distributing the food as well as was possible under the circumstances. One big dog, which he could not distinguish in the dark entrance, and which, after it had received its share, had driven all the other dogs away, seemed determined not to leave. Toolooah grew angry, seized his stick and rushed out after it to settle matters. But he came rushing back even faster than he went out, seized his gun hurriedly, and as hastily was gone again. * Copyright, by Frederick Schwatka, 1885.

Before we could collect our thoughts in order, or surmise what it all could mean, a shot was heard outside, and in a few seconds more Toolooah came crawling in, dragging a big wolf after him, its white fangs showing in its black mouth in a way that made us shudder. This was the big dog Toolooah had been feeding, but it did not underderstand the customs of the Eskimo dogs well enough to know that it must stop eating when only half satisfied; and this ignorance cost it its life. The wolves of the Arctic, by the way, are much

The Eskimo boys have a way of playing at musk-ox hunting that is very vigorous and earnest. In April, 1879, when I was on a sledge-journey to King William's Land, we came upon a herd of musk-oxen that we had sighted the day before, and after running them with dogs for a mile or two, the herd was surrounded, or "brought to bay," as hunters would say, and a number of the muskoxen killed. Of course we picked out some of the handsomest robes and put them on our sledges, and the next day we proceeded on our journey.

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larger, more powerful and ferocious than those seen in our country; and when pressed with hunger, they do not hesitate at all to make a meal off the Eskimo dogs, which they kill and eat at the very door of the igloo, if not prevented in some way. They are very much afraid of a bright light, however, and they will not come around a village or even a single igloo so long as they see even a small flame, so that it is generally late in the night, when the lamp is burning low or has gone out, that they make their attacks on the dogs, four or five of them often killing or maiming two or three times as many dogs.

During that day we passed several musk-ox trails in the snow, and it was very clear that we were in a country where these animals were quite numerous. After going into camp that evening between two slight hills that sloped down to the lake, where we cut through the ice to get our fresh water, there was a time when it appeared that I was the only person out-of-doors; all of the rest of the people were inside the igloos, or snow huts, that had just been built, arranging the reindeer skins for the bedding for the night. Suddenly, I noticed one of our best hunting-dogs (we had forty-two dogs altogether) run excitedly over the hill, followed closely

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"Oo-ming-muk! oo-ming-muk!!" (Musk- dogs seemed as badly sold as I had been, for all oxen! musk-oxen !!)

Toolooah seized his gun and ran to the top of the nearest ridge, about twenty yards away, followed by all the hunters in camp who had heard my outcry. And then the whole band of them sat down in a row on the ridge and laughed until the air was full of the reindeer hair shaken from their coats in their convulsive mirth; for the two musk-oxen proved to be only two musk-ox robes that we had secured the day before, with a boy or two under each robe!

These boys had procured the musk-ox robes when the sledges were being unloaded, and had slipped away, unperceived by any one, while the men were building the snow houses. After wrapping the robes around them they had come down near the igloos, keeping on the windward side, or that side of the camp where the wind blowing on them must also pass over the camp. All my boy readers know that if game or wild animals thus pass near good hunting-dogs, the dogs will "scent" them, as hunters would say. And so it

the camp had been drawn out by the excitement and noise; and so long as the boys kept the shaggy robes over their shoulders and faces, and kept their backs together with their heads outward, as do the musk-oxen themselves when surrounded and brought to bay by wolves or dogs, our dogs kept barking and snapping and jumping at them, evidently thinking they were genuine musk-oxen, and that there was a good prospect of another nice dinner if they only kept the oxen from running away until the hunters came up and killed them, as in the case of the real musk-oxen.

A musk-ox resembles a buffalo in appearance, except that the musk-ox has no "hump" on its shoulders, and the hair on its robe is two or three times as long as that on the buffalo (or American bison, as it should be called). In the winter-time this long hair reaches down beyond the knees almost to the hoofs, and when the musk-oxen are walking on the soft snow, they sink in so that you can not see their legs at all. It was this long hair, hanging down so low as to almost cover the legs

of the boys hidden underneath the robes, that had so helped to deceive me when I first saw them, and caused me to put the whole camp in an uproar and thereby fasten a very good joke on myself-a joke that clung to me a long time.

Toolooah, who was one of the most merryhearted and best-natured young Eskimo I ever saw, and who, as I have told you, was my best hunter, laughed until his sides were sore and his eyes were red; and for several weeks after that he would occasionally say "oo-ming-muk!" and laugh until the tears ran down his cheeks. It was not very

supposed prey, all the more fierce where there is so unusual a number as forty-two dogs and but two musk-oxen. Then with their toy arrows, which are specially blunted for this rough play, the other boys pelt the dangling robes in an earnest way that must often make the boys under the robes smart with pain, so heavily do the blunted arrows thud against them; but these little savages expect their plays to be very rough, and a whack over the knuckles that would break up a whole base-ball game of white boys, only brings out an emphatic "I-yi!" (their "ouch!") and the rough, harum

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often that they had a good joke on a white man, and this one they seemed to enjoy to their hearts'

content.

But the musk-ox hunt is not over yet for the boys; in fact, the most exciting part is still to come. As soon as the mock musk-oxen are "brought to bay" by the excited and foolish dogs, the other boys get their bows and arrows and hurry to the spot, encouraging the dogs, which have now become furious and wild, and have formed a most ferocious circle around their

scarum game goes on. In a little while, the dogs seem to comprehend that there is some foolishness about the matter, and begin to drop off one by one, in the order of their ability to see through the joke, and finally the game dies a natural death for want of the dogs and the noise and excitement which contribute to it.

The boys' mock polar-bear hunt is so much like their musk-ox hunt that a few lines will describe it. One of the boys of the village gets a polarbear robe, and wrapping it around him after he is

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