McCormick, who is general tinker and the very embodiment of ingenuity, has been making for me a surveyor's chain out of some iron rods; and a party, consisting of Sonntag, McCormick, Dodge, Radcliffe, and Starr, have been surveying the bay and harbor with this chain and the theodolite. They seem to have made quite a frolic of it, which, considering the depressed state of the thermometer, is, I think, a very commendable circumstance. Barnum and McDonald have been given a holiday, and they went out with shot-guns after reindeer. They report having seen forty-six, all of which they succeeded in badly frightening, and they also started many foxes. Charley also had a holiday, but, disdaining the huntsman's weapons, he started on a "voyage of discovery," as he styled it. Strolling down into the bay above Crystal Palace Cliffs,[4] he came upon an old Esquimau settlement, and, finding a grave, robbed it of its bony contents, and brought them to me wrapped up in his coat. It makes a very valuable addition to my ethnological collection, and a glass of grog and the promise of other holidays have secured the coöperation of Charley in this branch of science. Charley, by the way, is one of my most reliable men, and gives promise of great usefulness. Indeed, everybody in the vessel seems desirous of adding to my collections; but this zeal has to-day led me into a rather unpleasant embarrassment. Jensen, whose long residence among the Esquimaux of Southern Greenland has brought him to look upon that people as little better than the dogs which drag their sledges, discovered a couple of graves and brought away the two skin-robed mummies which they enclosed, thinking they would make fine museum specimens; and in this surmise he was quite right; but, unfortunately for the museum, Mrs. Hans was prowling about when Jensen arrived on board, and, recognizing one of them by some article of its fur clothing as a relative, she made a terrible ado, and could not be quieted even by Jensen's assurance that I was a magician, and would restore them to life when in my own country; so, when I learned the circumstances, I thought it right, in respect to humanity if not to science, to restore them to their stony graves, and had it done accordingly. [Footnote 4: Discovered and so named by Captain Inglefield, R. N., in August, 1852.] [Sidenote: ESQUIMAU GRAVES.] The Esquimau graves appear to be numerous about the harbor, giving evidence of quite an extensive settlement at no very remote period. These graves are merely piles of stones arranged without respect to direction, and in the size of the pile and its location nothing has been consulted but the convenience of the living. The bodies are sometimes barely hidden. Tombs of the dead, they are, too, the mournful evidences of a fast dwindling race. October 18th.