during the last ten years, bringing with them a full outfit, as ladies always do, of everything under the sun that women want to wear, has given the native female mind an undue expansion up there and stimulated it to unwonted activity. They watch the cut of the garments and borrow the patterns, and some of them are very expert dressmakers to-day. When the Russians controlled affairs, the women were the hewers of drift-wood and the drawers of water. At St. Paul there was no well of drinking-fluid about the village, nor within half a mile of the village. There was no drinking-water unless it was caught in reservoirs, and the cistern-water, owing to those particles of seal-fat soot which fall upon the roofs of the houses, is rendered undrinkable, so that the supply for the town until quite recently used to be carried by women from two little lakes at the head of the lagoon, a mile and a half as the crow flies from the village, and right under Telegraph Hill. This is quite a journey, and when it is remembered that they drink so much tea, and that water has to go with it, some idea of the labor of the old and young females can be derived from an inspection of the map. Latterly, within the last four or five years, the company have opened a spring less than half a mile from the “gorode,” which they have plumbed and regulated, so that it supplies them with water now and renders the labor next to nothing, compared with all former difficulty. But to-day, when water is wanted in the Aleutian houses at St. Paul, the man has to get it—the woman does not; he trudges out with a little wooden firkin or tub on his back and brings it to the house. Some of the natives save their money; yet there are very few among them, perhaps not more than a dozen, who have the slightest economical tendency. What they cannot spend for luxuries, groceries, and tobacco they manage to get away with at the gaming-table. They have their misers and their spendthrifts, and they have the usual small proportion who know how to make money, and then how to spend it. A few among them who are in the habit of saving have opened a regular bank-account with the company. Some of them have to-day two or three thousand dollars saved, drawing an interest of nine per cent. When the ships arrive and go, the severe and necessary labor of lightering their cargoes off and on from the roadsteads where they anchor is principally performed by these people, and they are paid so much a day for their labor: from fifty cents to one dollar, according to the character of the service they render. This operation, however, is much dreaded by the ship-captains and sea-going men, whose habits of discipline and automatic regularity and effect of working render them severe critics and impatient coadjutors of the natives, who, to tell the truth, hate to do anything after they have pocketed their reward for sealing; and when they do labor after this, they regard it as an act of very great condescension on their part.