In this fashion the sea-otter hunter appears to us as we view him now; his children come, grow up, and branch out, to repeat his life and doing, as they show themselves capable of living by their own exertions as hunters and fishermen. He is a peaceful, affectionate, and thoroughly undemonstrative parent, a kind husband, and he imposes no burden upon his wife that he does not fully share, unless he becomes a drunkard, when, in that event, a sad change is made in the man. He gets drunk, and his wife too, by taking sugar, flour, and dried-apples, rice or hops, if he can get them, in certain proportions, puts them into a barrel or cask, with water, bungs it up and waits for fermentation to do its work. Before it has worked entirely clear he draws off a thick, sour liquid which intoxicates him most effectually—he beats his spouse and runs her and children from the house, smashes things, and for weeks afterward the barrabkie is desolate and open as the result of such orgies. If he continues, his health is shattered, he rapidly fails as a hunter, and he suffers the pangs of poverty with his family. It is said upon good authority that the brewing of this liquor was taught to these people by the earliest Russian arrivals in their country, who made it as an anti-scorbutic; but it certainly has not proved to be a blessing in disguise, for it has brought upon them nearly all the misery that they are capable of understanding. In concluding this brief introduction to the life of the otter-hunter, we may fitly call attention to the fact that Kahgoon and his family are devout members of the Greek Catholic Church, as are all of his people, without a single exception, between Attoo and Kadiak Islands—nearly five thousand souls to-day, living in scattered hamlets all along between. The subtle acumen displayed by the sea-otter in the selection of its habitat can only be fully appreciated by him who has visited the chosen land, reefs, and water of its resort. It is a region so gloomy, so pitilessly beaten by wind and waves, by sleet, rain and persistent fog, that the good Bishop Veniaminov, when he first came among the natives of the Aleutian Islands, ordered the curriculum of hell to be omitted from the church breviary, saying, as he did so, that these people had enough of it here on this earth! The fury of hurricane gales, the vagaries of swift and intricate currents in and out of the passages, the eccentricities of the barometer, the blackness of the fog enveloping all in its dark, damp shroud, so alarm and discomfit the white man that he willingly gives up the entire chase of the sea-otter to that brown-skinned Aleut, who alone seems to be so constituted as to dare and wrestle with these obstacles through descent from his hardy ancestors, who, in turn, have been centuries before him engaged just as he is to-day.