This house into which I had come as guest consisted of a kitchen, a small living-room, and a tiny bedroom. The old gentleman's wife was fifty-five years old, and was still nursing her fifteenth child, which, at night, was swung from the ceiling, while the father and mother occupied a narrow bed. Three of the smaller children slept on the floor beneath the bed. The room was eight feet long and six feet wide. The fireplace in the living-room was a huge stone oven, which projected through the partition into the bedroom. Every evening its capacious maw was filled with logs, and this insured heat in the heavy stone body of the stove for at least twenty-four hours. In the mouth of this oven the kettles were hung. This house was far above the average; for, in truth, there were only twelve others as good in the whole immense district. For dinner, the first course was a startling one. It consisted of a huge bowl of boiled fish-eyes. This is considered a great delicacy by the natives of the far North. When the dish was set before me, and I saw a hundred eyes glaring at me from all directions and at all angles, cross, squint, and wall, it simply took my appetite away. I had to turn them down, so that the pupil was not visible, before I could attack them. The old gentleman and I ate alone, the rest of the family not being allowed to sit down with us. This was eminently satisfactory to me, as we ate from the same dish; in fact, I could have dispensed with my host too. The second dish consisted of fish-heads. I found on these a sort of gelatin or cartilage that was very good eating. Then came a kind of cake, fried in seal-oil, of which the less said the better. For dessert, we had a dish of yagada, which is much like our raspberry, except that it is yellow and rather acid. The rest of the family, together with my men, squatted on the floor of the kitchen, and ate from tables a foot high by three feet square. In the center of each table was set a large bowl of a kind of fish-chowder. Each person wielded a spoon made from the horn of the mountain sheep, and held in the left hand a piece of black bread. After dinner they all had tea. No sugar is put in the tea, but a small lump is given to each person, and he nibbles it as he sips his tea. It is the height of impoliteness to ask for a second piece of sugar. Many of these people drink as many as sixty cups of tea in a single day. They seldom, if ever, drink water.