The main idea of the frequent acknowledgment of breaches of village law is undoubtedly to keep the social life intact, to ensure that no secrecies and plottings shall break it up, and no hoarding of supplies lead to quarrels and injustices. Another feature of the Sedna day is a general “confessing” of all these “sins.” Another lesser luminary, called a Noonageeksaktoot, dresses himself up in a medley of garments and dons a close-fitting cap made from the skull of a ground seal. This cap has a peak, to represent a bird’s bill. He binds upon his feet some of the sticks used for beating snow from clothes, so that they resemble a raven’s, and hops about in imitation of that bird. As often as the people come up and accuse themselves of wrongdoing, he betakes himself to the beach, to tell Sedna, and returns with forgiveness. It will be readily understood that it is of great value in the hard fight for existence in the arctic that a spirit of hope and cheerfulness should be maintained. No one knows this better than the commander of an arctic or antarctic expedition, or than the head of a trading station! It is quite essential that the Eskimo village should make itself a centre of jollity and comfort to the returning hunters, and to travellers on the trail. There are sound economic principles underneath the queer trappings of some of all this barbaric custom, and even sound hygienic laws governing some of the regulations and taboos of daily life. That one, for instance, which forbids a woman in childbirth to eat any food not provided by her husband, probably acts quite beneficially. Eskimo food is very rich and often consumed in the raw state, so that a glut of it, as would result from a shower of benefactions, would upset the new-made mother. The Sedna ceremony has been carefully studied by the best ethnologists, like Dr. Boas, who have travelled for the sake of science among the arctic tribes; but it may be hazarded that the raison d’être of much of it could only dawn on an observer who had actually lived for a very considerable time in close personal and linguistic touch with the people. The writer offers his interpretations with all diffidence, but believes they constitute something original to the descriptions of other writers. Those who easily dismiss the whole subject as fantastic savagery, much of which is unfit for publication, seem singularly to have failed in any real grasp of the character of these benighted, but in many ways cheery and genuine, children of the sternest wild in the world. CHAPTER XVI THE NATIVE SURGEON