All the cooking these natives seem to know anything about is to boil or stew such food as they do not consume nearly raw. Iron kettles have been in their possession for many generations, and were originally procured from the Russians. The condiment which they most affect has already been referred to, being nothing more nor less than rancid fish or seal oil, cooled and hardened into a sort of oleomargarine, the bare smell of which is sickening to the nostrils of a white person. This grease is spread liberally upon all their food and eaten with manifest relish. The inner bark of the spruce and hemlock trees is collected by the women in considerable quantities at certain seasons of the year, and is eaten by them, both in the green and dried state, after being dipped in this grease as described. The Sitka Indians make a most atrocious salad of sea-weed mixed with seal-oil, sometimes adding the roe of herring, of which peculiar mixture they partake with ravenous appetites, the roe having been purposely kept until it is nearly or quite putrid. The salmon-berry, while it is in season, is a most welcome and wholesome addition to their rather circumscribed larder. This berry is a sort of cross between a strawberry and a blackberry, though it is larger than the average of these delicious berries as they grow in the woods of New England. Hundreds of barrels of the native cranberry are gathered by the aborigines and shipped annually from here to San Francisco; they are smaller than the cultivated berry bearing the same name, which is grown in our Eastern States. The wild strawberries found among these islands and on the mainland excel in flavor the highly cultivated berry of our thickly-settled States, and may be found growing in abundance in the very shadow of the glaciers. The natives hereabouts have no domestic animals except a multitude of dogs of a mongrel breed; wolfish-looking creatures; which are of no possible use, dozing all day and howling all night. At the north the regularly bred Eskimo dog is a very different animal, quite indispensable to his master, and invaluable in connection with sledge traveling.