Secondly, in this condition of mere response to physical Nature, their whole being has become shapen, determined, fixed. They have no future. Civilization affects them, but only by mechanical modification, not by vital refreshment and renewal. The more they are instructed, the weaker they become. They change, and are unchangeable. Unchangeable: if they assume in any degree the ideas and habits of civilization, it is only as their women sometimes put on calico gowns over their seal-skin trousers. The modification is not even skin-deep. It is a curious illustration of this immobility, that no persuasion, no authority, can make them fishermen. Inseparable from the sea-shore, the Esquimaux will not catch a fish, if he can catch a dinner otherwise. The missionaries, both as matter of paternal care and as a means of increasing their own traffic,--by which the station is chiefly sustained,--have done their utmost to make the natives bring in fish for sale, and have failed. These people are first sealers, then hunters; some attraction in the blood draws them to these occupations; and at last it is an attraction in the blood which they obey. Yet on the outermost surface of their existence they change, and die. At Hopedale, out of a population of some two hundred, _twenty-four died in the month of March last!_ At Nain, where the number of inhabitants is about the same, twenty-one died in the same month; at Okkak, also twenty-one. More than decimated in a month! The long winter suffocation in their wooden dens, which lack the ventilation of the _igloe_ that their untaught wit had devised, has doubtless much to do with this mortality. But one feels that there is somewhat deeper in the case. One feels that the hands of the great horologe of time have hunted around the dial, till they have found the hour of doom for this primeval race. Now at length the tolling bell says to them, "No more! on the earth no more!" Farewell, geological man, _chef-d'oeuvre_, it may be, of some earlier epoch, but in this a grotesque, grown-up baby, never to become adult! As you are, and as in this world you must be, I have seen you; but in my heart is a hope for you which is greater than my thought,--a hope which, though deep and sure, does not define itself to the understanding, and must remain unspoken. There is a Heart to which you, too, are dear; and its throbs are pulsations of Destiny. DOCTOR JOHNS. XI. There were scores of people in Ashfield who would have been delighted to speak consolation to the bereaved clergyman; but he was not a man to be approached easily with the ordinary phrases of sympathy. He bore himself too sternly under his grief. What, indeed, can be said in the face of affliction, where the manner of the sufferer seems to say, "God has done it, and God does all things well"? Ordinary human sympathy falls below such a standpoint, and is wasted in the utterance.