No doubt potatoes and turnips, lettuce and cabbage, could be raised anywhere in those regions; the intensity of the season compensates for its shortness; the sun is in the heavens twenty-four hours in the day, and all living things sprout and grow with amazing rankness and celerity under the strong compulsion of his continuous rays. Spring comes literally with a shout and a rush here in Alaska, and must cry even louder and stride even faster in the "ultimate climes of the pole." If the possibility of raising garden-truck and tubers constitutes a "farming country," then all the arctic regions not actually under glacial ice may be so classed. Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster turnips and cabbages raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th parallel; from Sir William Parry's description we may feel quite sure that vegetables of size and excellence might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise"; Greely reported "grass twenty-four inches high and many butterflies" in the interior of Grinnell Land under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever discovered on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect to hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips and cabbages at Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d parallel, and getting a dollar a pound for them. In favourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior Alaska certain early varieties of Siberian oats and rye have been matured, and it stands to the credit of the Experiment Station at Rampart that a little wheat was once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from the sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world fills up so that economic pressure demands the utilisation of all earth that will produce any sort of food, it may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put under the plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all this vast country will ever be other than wild waste land. At present the farming population is strictly an appendage of the mining population, and the mining population rather diminishes than increases. Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull place at best and a poor dependence for merchandising, so that the little town of Hot Springs is fortunate in having some mining country around it to fall back upon for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for the stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through the heavy, drifted snow, having had enough of trail breaking for a while. At midnight the stage came, two days late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and as great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska. [Sidenote: NANOOK'S DEATH]