This act is characteristic of Alaskan men. I know no corner of the earth where a good woman is held in higher esteem. The men themselves are often unconscious of this characteristic, but it crops out in their little mannerisms. For instance, there are two ways of addressing a woman in Alaska. As one writer has already expressed it, "We call one kind of woman by her first name and don't know that she has any other. But the other kind of woman,--we call her _Mrs._! And we don't know whether she has a first name or not!" It was so with this woman. Neither miner, traveler, trader, workman nor wayfarer ever thinks of calling her other than Mrs. Dabney. But my experience is that there is no straighter way to a woman's heart than a manly and sincere apology! So, in this case, when she said quietly to the men that she had tried to give them good, clean food to eat and a comfortable place to sleep, that all she asked of them was that they obey the rules and not make her work more difficult or more disagreeable than was necessary, she made friends of those men forever. They respected her because they realized that she herself respected the law and stood for its enforcement. Finally she permitted them to return, but she ended the interview by saying: "You needn't think you can fool me, either. Any time one of you brings whisky into this house I can find it. More than that," she finished, "B---- says to-morrow is his birthday and he's going to celebrate. But he ain't,--even if he _is_ the Mayor of Roosevelt!" The men of Alaska, while they admit that the free use of liquor was once almost a necessity in the country, see no reason why it should be so now. Civilization has brought with it other and better means of keeping warm and in good spirits. Like many another thing of this twentieth century it has outlived its usefulness. There are comfortable homes in all the populated sections of Alaska now,--homes where one sees just what he would find anywhere else in the world. Social intercourse and family life are the same here as elsewhere. There is tennis. There is golf. There are music and dancing, and a "chummy" feeling seems to possess all the occupants of the land. There is a general impression that life in a thinly-populated country is not conducive to sociability. I have never found it so. There is a _bon camaraderie_ in Alaska that I have found nowhere else in the world. Perhaps it is of a brand not to be found except in the far spaces of the universe! There is one Great Day in Alaska,--the day when the ice goes out of the Bay in the spring! There is something about the sight and sound of _flowing_ water which moves one strangely after nine long months of the "still" cold. One relaxes unconsciously from a tenseness which until that moment he has not realized has possessed him and in this connection I would relate a bit of personal experience.