I rather expected our guests would depart after a call of an hour or so. Not so. They had come to stay indefinitely. When they became tired they lay on deck--it didn't make any particular difference where--and went quietly to sleep. They seemed to have no regular time for sleeping. I found Eskimos asleep and awake during all my deck watches. As it was day all the twenty-four hours, I wondered if these people without chronometers did not sometimes get their hours mixed up. New parties of Eskimos kept coming to see us. One of these had killed a walrus and the skin and the raw meat, butchered into portable cuts, lay in the bottom of their big family canoe of hide. The boat was tied alongside and the Eskimos came aboard. If any of them became hungry, they climbed down into the canoe and ate the raw walrus meat, smacking their lips over it. When the sailors would lean over the rail to watch this strange feat of gastronomy, the Eskimos would smile up at them with mouths smeared with blood and hold out a red chunk in invitation. It was their joke. We loafed in St. Lawrence Bay for more than a week. We could not have sailed away if we had wanted to, for all the time there was a windless calm and the sea heaved and fell, unruffled by a ripple, like a vast sheet of moving mercury. It was weather characteristic of the Arctic summer--a beautiful dream season of halcyon, silver seas, opalescent haze, and tempered golden sunlight. To the men in skin clothes, it was warm weather, but one had only to step from sunshine to shadow to pass from summer to winter. One perspired in the sunlight; in the shadow there was frost, and if the spot were damp, a coating of ice. I went duck hunting with a boat's crew one day. Mr. Winchester, who headed the boat, was a good hand with a shotgun and brought back a fine bag. One of the ducks, knocked over on the wing, dropped within a few feet of shore. When we rowed to pick it up, I touched Siberia with an oar. I felt that it was a sort of handshake with the Asiatic continent. I never landed and never got any nearer. In a little while, most of us had traded for a number of nicely tanned hair-seal skins and had set the Eskimo women and girls to work tailoring trousers and vests and coats. It was marvelous how dexterous they were at cutting and sewing. They took no measurements and yet their garments fitted rather snugly. Before they began sewing they softened the edges of the skins by chewing them. They wore their thimble on their index finger and drove the needle into one side of the skins and jerked it through from the other side with such amazing rapidity that the two movements seemed one. A good seamstress--and all seemed remarkably expert--could cut and sew a pair of trousers in an hour, a bit of work it would have taken a sailor a day or two to accomplish. We could hire a seamstress for an entire morning or afternoon for five hardtack. A bowl of soup with a piece of salt horse was sufficient pay for a day's labor.