Tuesday, March eleventh.
It blows incessantly, cold and clear,—blue days. I have painted most of to-day, first indoors, and then outdoors commencing a large picture. Olson has been with us much of the time. He treasures every little memento we can give him. In his pocket-book are snapshots of Kathleen, Clara, and Barbara. He wanted Barbara’s curl that I have—but I couldn’t give him that. It looks as if we should all go to Seward together. This wind is likely to hold until the full moon passes—and that’s still some days off. My trunk is about packed and what remains can be done in a very few hours.
THE STAR-LIGHTER
Speaking to Olson to-night about the possibility of a shipwrecked man being able to support life on this coast for any length of time he told of a native boy of Unga, “crazy Simyon,” who lived four years at Nigger Head, a wild part of Unga Island, with no shelter but a hole in a sand bank, no fire, no weapons or clothes, or tools; a first-hand story, long, wild, terrible, beginning with a boy’s theft of sacrificial wine, and ending in madness and murder.