We pause in that little cemetery, just outside of the village of Illoolook. It is on a small knoll, under higher hills that rear themselves over it. Its disorder and neglect is a fair reminder of what we see in most of our own rural graveyards. The practice of all these natives is to inter by digging a shallow grave. The body is prepared in its best clothes, and coffined in a plain wooden box. A small mound and a larger or smaller wooden Greek cross is the only monument. Tiny oil-portraits of their patron saints, painted on tin or sheet-iron, especially made for these purposes, and furnished by the Church, are tacked to the crosses, with now and then a rude Russian inscription carved or painted thereon in addition. During certain periods of the summer, when the weather is pleasant, little squads of relatives will come out here from the village and pass a whole day in tea-drinking and renovating the crosses, sitting on the mounds as they chat, work, and boil their samovar. The Illoolook church-bells ring—they arouse us to resume the walk thus interrupted in this small city of Aleutian dead. As we enter the town, we see the occupants of turfy barraboras and frame cottages hastening from every quarter and trooping to the door of a yellow-walled and red-roofed house of worship. Perched on that three-barred cross which crowns the cupola of this chapel are half a dozen big black ravens, all croaking most lugubriously, as the clanging chimes peal out below them. That is their favorite roosting-place. The natives take no notice of those ill-omened birds, which as feathered scavengers, hop around the barraboras in perfect security, since no one ever disturbs them, unless it be some graceless trader who is anxious to test the killing power of a new shotgun. They breed in high chinks of the bluffs, and find abundant food cast upon the beaches by the sea. A few domestic fowls, some with broods of newly-hatched chicks, are running about or scratching around the place. The priest’s shaggy little bull and cow stand in front of a small stable or “scoatnik,” lazily chewing their cud. There is no other live-stock in the hamlet, except a few dogs and cats; not a great many of the latter, however. West of this Island of Oonalashka is a narrow-lined stretch of more than eight hundred miles of rapidly-succeeding islets and islands, until the extreme limit of the Alaskan border is reached at Attoo. In all this dreary wilderness of land and water only three small human settlements are to be found to-day, with a population of less than five hundred natives and six or seven white men. Attoo, Atkha, and Oomnak are the only villages, the last closely adjoins Oonalashka, on a large island of the same name. [Illustration: THE VILLAGE AND HARBOR OF ATTOO This Settlement is the extreme Western Town of North America: it is three thousand miles West of San Francisco]