When the ceremony was ended, the married pair retired into the mission-house, and half an hour later I saw them going home. This was the curious part of the affair. The husband walked before, taking care not to look behind, doing the indifferent and unconscious with great assiduity, and evidently making it a matter of serious etiquette not to know that any one followed. Four rods behind comes the wife, doing the unconscious with equal industry. She is not following this man here in front,--bless us, no, indeed!--but is simply walking out, or going to see a neighbor, this nice afternoon, and does not observe that any one precedes her. Following that man? Pray, where were you reared, that you are capable of so discourteous a supposition? It gave me a malicious pleasure to see that the pre-Adamite man, as well as the rest of us, imposes upon himself at times these difficult duties, _toting_ about that foolish face, so laboriously vacant of precisely that with which it is brimming full. To adjust himself to outward Nature,--that, we said, is the sole task of the primitive man. The grand success of the Esquimaux in this direction is the _kayak_. This is his victory and his school. It is a seal-skin Oxford or Cambridge, wherein he takes his degree as master of the primeval arts. Here he acquires not only physical strength and quickness, but self-possession also, mental agility, the instant use of his wits,--here becomes, in fine, a _cultivated_ man. It is no trifling matter. Years upon years must be devoted to these studies. Oxford and Cambridge do not task one more, nor exhibit more degrees of success. Some fail, and never graduate; some become illustrious for kayak-erudition. This culture has also the merit of entire seriousness and sincerity. Life and death, not merely a name in the newspapers, are in it. Of all vehicles, on land or sea, to which man intrusts himself, the kayak is safest and unsafest. It is a very hair-bridge of Mohammed: security or destruction is in the finest poise of a moving body, the turn of a hand, the thought of a moment. Every time that the Esquimaux spears a seal at sea, he pledges his life upon his skill. With a touch, with a moment's loss of balance, the tipsy craft may go over; over, the oar, with which it is to be restored, may get entangled, may escape from the hand, may--what not? For all _what-nots_ the kayaker must preserve instant preparation; and with his own life on the tip of his fingers, he must make its preservation an incidental matter. He is there, not to save his life, but to capture a seal, worth a few dollars! It is his routine work. Different from getting up a leading article, making a plea in court, or writing Greek iambics for a bishopric!