The art of living comfortably in the North had to be learned, and it has been learned pretty thoroughly. People live at Nome as well as they do "outside." One may sit down to dinners as well cooked, as well furnished, as well served as any dinners anywhere. The good folk of Nome delight in spreading their dainty store before the unjaded appetite of the winter traveller, and it would be affectation to deny that there is keen relish of enjoyment in the long-unwonted gleam of wax candle or electrolier upon perfect appointment of glass, silver, and napery, in the unobtrusive but vigilant service of white-jacketed Chinaman or Jap. Nome has a great advantage over its only rival in the interior, Fairbanks, in the matter of freight rates. The same merchandise that is landed at the one place for ten or twelve dollars a ton within ten or twelve days of its leaving Seattle, costs fifty or sixty at the other, and takes a month or more to arrive. But this accessibility in the summer is exactly reversed in the winter. No practicable route has been discovered along the uninhabited shores of Bering Sea, and all the mail for Nome comes from Valdez to Fairbanks and then down the Yukon and round Norton Sound by dog team. In winter Fairbanks is within seven or eight days of open salt water; Nome a full month. After navigation closes in October, the first mail does not commonly reach the Seward Peninsula until January. So that, with all its comforts and luxuries, Nome is a very isolated place for eight months in the year. [Illustration: GOLD-MINING AT NOME.] [Illustration: PULLING THE "PELICAN" OUT WITH A "SPANISH WINDLASS."] [Sidenote: MINING AT NOME] We went out with the dog sled to the diggings a few miles behind the town, and a busy scene we found, enveloped in steam and smoke. Here an old beach line had been discovered and was yielding rich reward for the working. A long line of conical "dumps" marked its extension roughly parallel with the present shore, and the buckets that arose from the depths, travelled along a cable, and at just the right moment upset their contents, continually added to these heaps. All the winter "pay-dirt" is thus excavated and stored; in the summer when the streams run the gold is sluiced out. But that phrase "when the streams run" covers a world of difficulty and expense to the miner. In some places in this Seward Peninsula, ditches thirty and forty miles long have been constructed to insure the streams running when and where they are needed.