Through the irony of fickle fortune the civilized men had found themselves unable to maintain life by the chase of the land and sea game of the region. In dire distress, with failing food, they faced certain death unless aid should come from outside sources. To the savage and famine-threatened men of Etah the appalling condition of their alien visitors was clearly evident. Moreover, if the helpless white men were simply left to themselves they must soon perish, leaving for the Inuits untold wealth of hitherto unknown treasures,--of iron and wood, of cloth and cordage, of robes and of weapons. In this fearful crisis, amid arctic cold and in polar darkness, savage humanity rose to heroic heights. Selfishness and covetousness stood abashed among these children of the stone age, and in their stead were awakened holy feelings of human pity and a spirit of self-denying charity. Their deeds show that in the white north as in the sunny south there abide the true spirit of brotherly love and a recognized sense of human interdependence. After the Etah manner, there recurred the episode of the Samaritan charity of ancient Judea. Yet the action of the Inuit even surpassed the deed of the good man of Palestine, for Etah aid was not the outcome of a rich man's loving generosity to a penniless sufferer, but it also paralleled the widow's mite, for Kalutunah, the savage sorcerer, and his tribesmen gave the sole food of to-morrow for their wives and children to save from death the rich and alien white men of the unknown south. Does heroism rise to nobler deeds in the midst of our superior civilization and higher development? FOOTNOTES: [8] See map, page 95. [9] In order to raise the puppies and save them from the devouring jaws of the ravenous, starving dogs, litters are kept in the huts, or elsewhere in a protected place, until they are large enough to run about and seek their mother's aid when attacked. DR. RAE AND THE FRANKLIN MYSTERY "An age which passes over in silence the merits of the heroic deserves as a punishment that it should not bring forth such an one in its midst."--FORSTER. In 1845 Captain John Franklin, royal navy, in command of the ships _Erebus_ and _Terror_, sailed with one hundred and twenty-nine souls to make the northwest passage. His orders carried him via Lancaster Sound and Cape Walker, and he was provisioned for three years. The ships were last seen by civilized men in Baffin Bay, whence they passed from the knowledge of the world. In 1847 great anxiety prevailed as to the fate of the expedition, and fears of its loss grew stronger from year to year. More than a score of ships, with crews of nearly two thousand men, at an expense of millions of dollars vainly sought, between 1847 and 1853, news of the missing squadron, and the British Parliament offered a reward of ten thousand pounds sterling for the first accredited information regarding the lost explorers.