While they were on the exhibition stand, in the torrid heat, they had to wear those heavy clothes of furs and skins which the ladies said looked so picturesque. They knew how the polar bear felt in his cage away from his ice-blocks. The food the white man ate with relish was such queer stuff. They longed for that delicious tidbit, the flipper of a seal. How good the entrails of a gull, or a fox's stomach would have tasted! But the white men seemed to think that coffee, and watermelon and corn on the cob, and ham and eggs, and the pies their Eskimo mothers never used to make were good enough for them. Except for the warm blood of the seal, the Eskimo ordinarily has no use for a hot drink. Several of the older Eskimo wilted away like flowers, and died. They were buried and forgotten; and when the dogs died they were buried and forgotten too: there was about the same lack of ceremony in the one case as in the other. But little Pomiuk through thick and thin was the joyous life of the party. They worked him hard, because he amused the visitors. The visitors would throw nickels and dimes into the enclosure, and as the coins flickered in the air Pomiuk would lash out at them with his thirty-five foot whip. If he nicked the coin it was his. Then he would laugh--a very musical laugh, that could be heard a long way off. He was a jolly, friendly little soul, and he wore a smile that hardly came off even when he slept. But there came a time when even happy little Pomiuk could not smile. One day as he leapt high in the air, agile as a Russian dancer, to bring down one of those spinning coins with his whip, he fell on the boards, his hip striking a nail that stuck out. His mother ran to pick him up. His face was twisted with agony. He tried to stand, for her sake, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back in her arms, weak as a baby. What was she to do? The men who ran the exhibit had not kept their promises. Pomiuk was the chief bread-winner for them all. The coins he had nicked with his whip were most of what they had to spend. With this money they sent out and got a so-called "surgeon" who did not know his business, but took the money just the same. He patched up poor "Prince" Pomiuk so that the boy was worse off than before. The Fair closed: the Eskimo were stranded. If that had happened on a sea-beach at home, they would have known what to do: they would have laughed--for they are merry people, like our southern negroes--and they would have killed sea-birds with stones and made their way alongshore. But to be stranded in Chicago is another story. God knows how a few survivors of the band found pity in men's hearts, and straggled back to their home at Nachoak Bay.