The home-land of the Eskimo is dreary. They live in Labrador, Greenland, and the Arctic country stretching from Greenland west to Northern Alaska. Generally, it is a land of snow and ice, where it is impossible to raise even the most hardy plants. The people are forced to live chiefly on animal food. Not only is the weather usually cold, but for a large part of the year the Eskimo do not see the sun, and for the rest of it they see the sun all the time. In some districts the swarms of mosquitoes in the warmer part of the year are a great trouble. There are few trees, and those are stunted; wood is precious, and drift wood is carefully gathered to make into tools and weapons. But notwithstanding his dreary home the Eskimo are rarely ugly and ill tempered. They are little people with yellowish brown skin. Some Greenlanders are of fair stature. Their faces are broad and round, with coarse features. The eyes are small, dark, and often oblique, like the Chinese; the nose is narrow at the root, but fat; the cheeks are round and full; the mouth is big, with good, strong teeth. Eskimo are usually filthy and appear much darker than they really are. The clothing is generally made of skins with the hair left on. Men and women dress much alike. Trousers are worn by both: a shirt or jacket with a hood attached is much used. That worn by men is often made of bird skins, and the feather side is worn next the body. The lower part of the legs and the feet are encased in _kamiks_, skin socks and boots. The little babies are carried naked in a great pouch at the back of their outer jacket. This pouch makes a fine nest for the little creatures, as it is lined with soft sealskin or reindeer skin. Formerly—and perhaps sometimes now—the Eskimo mothers used to wash their babies by licking them with their tongues. In Greenland the Eskimo houses are usually built of stones and earth. They are partly below ground, and only the upper part shows outside, like a mound of dirt. To enter the house one crawls through a long and narrow passage, also built of stones and earth, and which is also partly below ground. The house is not large, and consists of one room. It is lined with skins. Wide benches around the sides, covered with skins and moss, serve as beds. Several families live crowded together in one house. One house in East Greenland, measuring twenty-seven by fifteen feet, contained eight families,—thirty-eight persons. The houses are so low that a tall man cannot stand upright in one. Until lately the only heating was by stone lamps. These were flat and hardly deeper than a plate: oil was burned in them. They were kept burning day and night, and above them were racks of poles on which wet clothing was dried. In the middle part of the Eskimo land they build the quaint round-topped huts made of blocks of snow, of which you have often seen pictures. [Illustration: GROUP OF GREENLAND ESKIMO (NANSEN).]