The uncle looked back at him with undisguised contempt. ‘Why, you fool, Tom,’ he answered quietly, ‘you don’t suppose I want to let Nora come out alone all the way from England to Trinidad in the very same steamer with that man Hawthorn’s son Edward? Impossible, impossible!—Here, you nigger fellow you, grinning over there like a chattering monkey, bring my mare out of the stable at once, sir, will you—do you hear me, image?—for I’m going to ride down direct to Port-of-Spain this very minute along with your master. Hurry up, there, jackanapes!’ THE LAND OF FURS. In 1867, the United States government, for a payment to Russia of about a million and a half pounds sterling, received in exchange the strange isolated country in the far north known as Alaska, separated by one thousand miles of British colonial territory from the republican frontier. For some years there were constant conflicts with the Indians, and altogether the early history of the American occupation of Alaska is not a bright one. The San Franciscan speculators who had been attracted by hopes of gold and of untold wealth in forests and fisheries were wofully disappointed, and the majority of them gradually cleared out again. A mere glance at the map hardly gives one an idea of the enormous superficial extent of this outlying possession of our American cousins. According to the special Report of the United States Census Commissioners—to which we are mainly indebted for the facts given in this article—the total area of Alaska is five hundred and thirty-one thousand four hundred and nine square miles, or about one-sixth of the entire area of the United States. But one hundred and twenty-five thousand two hundred and forty-five square miles are wholly within the arctic circle, an area which has rarely been traversed by the white man, and upon the coast-borders of which are a few Eskimo villages. The natives of these, it is sad to learn, are becoming rapidly deteriorated by commerce with the crews of the whalers which resort in summer to the neighbourhood, and seek only to barter what natural produce, in the shape of furs, or oil, or ivory, they can collect for the means of intoxication. The immense area of the northern division of Alaska is left to the bear, the fox, the reindeer, and other polar animals, and to somewhere about three thousand degraded Eskimos.