The Eskimos are great story-tellers, and the bulk of their fables, handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation, has assumed a stereotyped form. Their narration demands the exercise of an art in which the arctic folk excel—the art of vivid narration. Many of these tales begin as recitatives; some are almost wholly related in verse or musical form; others are told in prose, with every sort of appropriate gesture, modulation of the voice, and facial expression. A number of them are onomatopoeic in character, imitating the calls and cries of the birds and creatures of the wild. Story-telling is one of the principal features of the social life of these people of the north, and bulks largely in the programme of all festivities. Many of the Eskimo legends would require a certain amount of bowdlerising before they could be presented to the world as a book of Eskimo tales, a contribution to the folk lore of the nations; but some of them (notably the well dramatised story of the migration of the Saglingmiut, with its very essence of primitive arctic life) could be retold intact. Ethnologists have made a fairly representative collection of these stories in the course of the past fifty years, and most of them are to be found in the bibliography of arctic travel. Those incidental to these pages, with the exception, of course, of the Sedna tradition, are fresh contributions to the subject, not included, to the best of the writer’s belief, in any other work. An amusing tale, related to the writer, is that of the amorous youth who made a particularly disappointing mistake. In a certain village there lived a lovely maiden with her father. She possessed little but a happy disposition and a ready smile. The old man himself was so poor that his one dream of the future turned on the hope of his daughter securing a first-class hunter for a husband, who would provide for the two of them ever after. No young man, attracted by the girl’s bright eyes, was made welcome over the lamp in that igloo unless her father satisfied himself as to his credentials. But, as luck will have it apparently all the world over, the daughter’s love was won by the most ineligible suitor of them all—a youth poor in everything but in courage and hope and promise. The old man rejected all his overtures and rudely denied him his daughter. So the two were driven to form plans of their own.