May tenth: Mollie went out early with Muky, her dog-team and guns, to escort Ageetuk, Alice and Punni Churah, with their mother, who is Mollie's aunt, to their new hunting camp in the mountains. At seven in the evening Mollie returned with wet feet. Tomorrow she will take a net, and some other things they have forgotten. They have gone to take their annual spring vacation and hunt grey squirrels for a month, living in a hut in the meantime. The weather is warm and springlike. May thirteenth: The captain has been obliged to go to Nome on business, weak and ill though he is, and has been for months. It did not seem to me that he could live through the winter, and he is far too weak to take this long trip over the trail, but he says he is obliged to go, and will return at the earliest possible moment. He has taken Fred, the Russian boy, and a team of nine dogs, leaving after supper, and intending to travel night and day, as we now have no darkness. The dissipated men around camp, idle and drunken most of the time, with nothing to occupy their attention after the long, tedious winter, still spend their hours in gossiping, swearing, drinking, and gambling, knowing no day and no night, but making both hideous to those around them. As a destroyer of man's self-respect, independence, and dignity, there is nothing to compare with the accursed liquor. There are numbers of instances in camp proving the truth of this statement. There is the English clergyman's tall and handsome son, well educated, musical and of agreeable manners--fitted to grace the best society, but--liquor is to blame for his present condition, which is about as low as man can sink. It is ten in the evening and I am in my little room upstairs, the only white woman in the camp except Mellie and two like her. Down stairs in the bar-room the men are singing, first coon songs and then church hymns, with all the drunken energy they can muster. The crash of broken glass, angry oaths, and the slamming of doors reaches my ears so frequently as to cause little surprise, the French cooks in the kitchen adding their share to the disturbance. In a distant part of the hotel lies the little sick girl, her cot rolled each night close to the bedside of her mother, who tries to soothe her in her pain, Mollie and the wicked little Eskimo servant being the only women besides myself in the house. The noise and confusion increases down stairs, and I shall sleep little tonight. I will look at my revolver and see that its contents have not been removed.