There is much sameness about winter scenes in Alaska, as the reader has doubtless already remarked; yet the sameness is more due to a lack of alertness in the photographer than to an absence of variety. If the traveller had nothing to think about but his camera, if all other considerations could be subordinated to the securing of negatives, then, here as elsewhere, the average merit of pictures would be greater. Sometimes the most interesting scenes occur in the midst of stress of difficult travel when there is opportunity for no more than a fleeting recognition of their pictorial interest. "Tight places" often make attractive pictures, but most commonly do not get made into pictures at all. The study of the aspects of nature is likely to languish amidst the severe weather of the Northern winter, and the bright, clear, mild day gets photographed into undue prominence. Snow is more or less white and spruce-trees in the mass are more or less black; one dog team is very like another; a native village has to be known very well, indeed, to be distinguishable from another native village. Yet there is individuality, there is distinction, there is variety, there is contrast, if a man have but the grace to recognise them and the zeal to record them. Snow itself has infinite variety; trees, all of them, have characters of their own. Dogs differ as widely as men and Indians as widely as white men. [Sidenote: INDIANS AND PHOTOGRAPHS] The fear of the camera, or the dislike of the camera, that used to affect the native mind is gone now, save, perhaps, in certain remote quarters, and these interesting people are generally quite willing to stand still and be snapped. They ask for a print, and upon one's next visit there is clamorous demand for "picter, picter." A famous French physician said that his dread of the world to come lay in his expectation that the souls he met would reproach him for not having cured a certain obstinate malady that he had much repute in dealing with; so the travelling amateur in photography sometimes feels his conscience heavy under a load of promised pictures that he has forgotten or has been unable to make. He feels that his native friends whom he shall meet in the world to come will assuredly greet him with "where's my picture?" The burden increases all the time, and the Indian never forgets. It avails nothing even to explain that the exposure was a failure. A picture was promised; no picture has been given; that is as far as the native gets. And the making of extra prints, in the cases where it is possible to make them, is itself quite a tax upon time and material.