The two shook hands, and the boys all shouted with delight; and on the very next Saturday one of these two boys went out hunting quail with a fine shotgun on his shoulder. It was the silent little hero, The Bear-Slayer of San Diego. XV. ALASKAN AND POLAR BEAR. "And round about the bleak North Pole Glideth the lean, white bear." Nearly forty years ago, when down from the Indian country to sell some skins in San Francisco, I saw a great commotion around a big ship in the bay, and was told that a Polar bear had been discovered floating on an iceberg in the Arctic, and had been taken alive by the ship's crew. I went out in a boat, and on boarding the ship, just down from Alaska with a cargo of ice, I saw the most beautiful specimen of the bear family I ever beheld. A long body and neck, short legs, small head, cream-white and clean as snow, this enormous creature stood before us on the deck, as docile as a lamb. This is as near as ever I came to encountering the Polar bear, although I have lived in the Arctic and have more than one trophy of the bear family from the land of everlasting snows. Bear are very plenty in Alaska and the Klondike country, and they are, perhaps, a bit more ferocious than in California, for I have seen more than one man hobbling about the Klondike mines on one leg, having lost the other in an argument with bear. As a rule, the flesh is not good, here, in the salmon season, for the bear is in all lands a famous fisherman. He sits by the river and, while you may think he is asleep, he thrusts his paw deep down, and, quick as wink, he lands a huge salmon in his bunch of long, hooded claws. A friend and I watched a bear fishing for hours on the Yukon, trying to learn his habits. I left my friend, finally, and went to camp to cook supper. Then, it seems, my friend shot him, for his skin, I think. Thinking the bear dead, he called to me and went up to the bear, knife in hand. But the bear rose up when he felt the knife, caught the man in his arms and they rolled in the river together. The poor man could not get away. When we recovered his body far down the river next day, the bear still held him in her arms. She was a long, slim cinnamon, said to be the most savage fighter in that region.