Standing proudly up against the wall in one corner of the cabin was a rather pathetic object to my eyes--an elaborate gilt-handled silk umbrella. There needed no one to tell its story; it spoke of a visit to the Yukon with furs to sell and the usual foolish purchase of gay and glittering trash--novel and quite useless. What easy prey these poor people are to the wiles of the trader! Said one of them to me recently, when I asked the purpose of an "annex" to his store with a huge billiard-table in it--at an exclusive native village--"It's to get their money; there's no use trying to fool you; if we can't get it one way we've got to get it another." This gorgeous silk umbrella was concrete expression of the same sentiment. It was bought outside, it was brought into the country, it was set on exhibition in the store, because some trader judged it likely to attract a native eye. No one, white or native, uses an umbrella in interior Alaska. We made twenty-five miles the next day through a wide, open country, well wooded in places with a park-like distribution of trees, unwonted in our travels and attractive. A new species of spruce threw thick branches right down to the ground and tapered up to a perfect cone; each tree apart from the others and surrounded by sward instead of underbrush. There was a dignity about these trees that the common Yukon spruce never attains. Rolling hills of small elevation stretched on either hand and game signs abounded. After eight hours of such travel we spoke of camping, but presently saw footprints in the snow and pushed on to the bank of a little river, the Chedolothna, where stood a cabin, a tent, and several high caches. Here, with two families that occupied the cabin, we stayed the night. [Sidenote: MEASLES AND DIPHTHERIA] Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at Minchúmina, make up all the population of a region perhaps a hundred and fifty miles square. Yet it is a noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all the interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people. Signs, indeed, of a much larger occupation of it were not wanting, and all accounts speak of the wholesale destruction of the natives by disease. We were told of a village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in 1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most thinly peopled in all the territory.