"A little girl sat on the worn front doorsteps of the Randall house. She sat very still and straight, with her short, white skirts fluffed daintily out on both sides, her hands tightly clasped over her thin knees, and her long, silk-stockinged legs cuddled tight together. She was bare-headed, and her short, soft hair showed silvery blonde in the fading light. Her hair was bobbed. For one miserable month it had been the only bobbed head in Green River. Her big, gray-green eyes had a fugitive, dancing light in them. The little girl had beautiful eyes. The little girl was Miss Judith Devereux Randall. She was eleven years old, and she felt happier to-night than she remembered feeling in all the eleven years of her life."

Along the eastern bank a small Indian canoe, containing a single individual, was stealing its way--"hugging" the shore so as to take advantage of the narrow band of shadow that followed the winding of the stream. There were no trees on either side of the river, but this portion was walled in by bluffs, rising from three or four to fully twenty feet in height. The current was sluggish and not a breath of air wrinkled the surface on this mild summer night.

The Central Eskimo live away up north in that great American archipelago which lies between Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, and the Arctic Ocean; an archipelago in which the islands are so large, so numerous, and so irregular in outline that, as one looks at a map of them, he could fancy they were "chunks" of the continent which had been broken to pieces by some huge iceberg that bumped into it.