presented to my eyes in 1872-73, I should hardly have taken the active steps which I did to put the nuisance down; for it involved me, at first, in a bitter personal controversy, which, although I knew at the outset was inevitable, still it weighed nothing in the scales against the evil itself. A few febrile disorders are occurring, yet they yield readily to good treatment. The inherent propensity of man to gamble is developed here to a very appreciable degree, but it in no way whatever suggests the strange gaming love and infatuation with which all Indians and Eskimo elsewhere of Alaska are possessed. The chief delight of men and boys in the two villages is to stand on the street corners “pitching” half-dollars. So devoted, indeed, have I found the native mind to this hap-hazard sport, that frequently I would detect groups of them standing out in pelting gales of wind and of rain, “shying” silver coins at the little dirt-driven pegs. A few of them, men and women, play cards with much skill and intelligence. One of the peculiarities[104] of these people is that they seldom undress when they go to bed—neither the men, women, nor children; and also that at any and all hours of the night during the summer season, when I have passed in and out of the village to and from the rookeries, I always found several of the natives squatting before their house-doors or leaning against the walls, stupidly staring out into the misty darkness of the fog, or chatting one with the other over their pipes. A number of the inhabitants, by this disposition, are always up and around throughout the settlement during the entire night and day. In olden times, and even recently, these involuntary sentinels of the night have often startled the whole village by shouting at the top of their voices the pleasant and electric announcement of the “ship’s light!” or they have frozen it with superstitious horror at daybreak by then reciting some ghostly vision that had appeared to them. The urchins play marbles, spin tops, and fly kites, intermittently, with all the feverish energy displayed by such youth of our own surroundings; they frolic at base-ball, and use “shinny” sticks with great volubility and activity. The girls are, however, much more repressed, and, though they have a few games, and play quietly with quaintly dressed dolls, yet they do not appear to be possessed of that usual feminine animation so conspicuously marked in our home-life.