A human body is a kind of locomotive furnace, that has to be kept up to a given temperature by fuel, its food. Under a tropical sun, not much fuel is needed, and that of a sort that will not keep up a large fire. Man, therefore, wears clothes made from a vegetable fibre, and eats fruit and rice, the lowest in the scale of heat-making materials. Far north among the polar ice, where you cannot touch metal without its taking the skin off your fingers, the human locomotive is protected by thick coverings of fur: the native takes the jackets from his furry-footed companions, and covers his own skin with them. But the grand oil-springs—the locomotive’s necessary coal-mines in another form—are in the bodies of the great seals and whales. Oil and blubber burn rapidly, and give out a large amount of heat. With a fur-suit outside, and inside a feed of seal’s flesh washed down with seal’s oil, the steam of life is kept up very easily. But all the fat of the sea is not in the bodies of those great blubbering whales and seals. There is a fish, small in size, not larger than a smelt, that is fat beyond all description, clad in glittering silver armour, and found on the coasts of British Columbia, Russian America, Queen Charlotte and Vancouver Islands, which is called by the natives _Eulachon_ or Candle-fish. I have had both leisure and opportunity to make this fish’s intimate acquaintance; played the spy upon its habits, its coming and going, and have noted how it is caught and cured. Picture my home—an Indian village, on the north shore of British Columbia. The village is prettily situated on a rocky point of land, chosen, as all Indian villages are, with an eye to prevention of surprise from concealed foes. Rearward it is guarded by a steep hill, and it commands from the front the entrance to one of those long canals, which, as I have previously stated, resemble the fiords of Norway, often running thirty or forty miles inland. The dwellings consist of ten or fifteen rude sheds, about twenty yards long and twelve wide, built of rough cedar-planks; the roof a single slant covered with poles and rushes. Six or eight families live in each shed. Every family has its own fire on the ground, and the smoke, that must find its way out as best it can through cracks and holes (chimneys being objected to), hangs in a dense upper cloud, so that a man can only keep his head out of it by squatting on the ground: to stand up is to run a risk of suffocation. The children of all ages, in droves, naked and filthy, live under the smoke; as well as squaws, who squat round the smouldering logs; innumerable dogs, like starving wolves, prick-eared, sore-eyed, snappish brutes, unceasingly engaged in faction-fights and sudden duels, in which the whole pack immediately takes sides. Felt, but not heard, are legions of bloodthirsty fleas, that would try their best to suck blood from a boot, and by combined exertions would soon flay alive any man with a clean and tender skin.