It is not for the host to tell tales of his after-dinner company. But the truth of history may be satisfied without an intimation that our guests paid niggard honors to the jolly god of a milder clime. The veriest prince, of bottle memories, would not have quarreled with their heel-taps. * * *
We were inside the rocky islands of Pröven harbor as our watches told us that another day had begun. The time was come for parting. The ladies shed a few kindly tears as we handed them to the stern-seats: their learned kinsman took a recumbent position below the thwarts, which favored a continuance of his nap; and the rest of the party were bestowed with seaman-like address—all but one unfortunate gentleman, who, having protracted his festive devotions longer than usual, had resolved not to “go home till morning.”
The case was a difficult one; but there was no help for it. As the sailors passed him to the bottom of the boat, and again out upon the beach, he made the air vocal with his indignant outcries. The dogs—I have told you of the dogs of these settlements, how they welcomed our first arrival—joined their music with his. The Prövenese came chattering out into the cold, like chickens startled from their roost. The governor was roused by the uproar. And in the midst of it all, our little weather-beaten flotilla ran up the first American flag that had been seen in the port of Pröven.
T
HE port of Pröven is securely sheltered by its monster hills. But they can not be said to smile a welcome upon the navigator. A smiling country, like a smiling face, needs some provision of fleshly integuments; and no earthly covering masks the grinning rocks of Pröven. They look as if the process of crumbling, and wrinkling, and splitting, and splintering had been at work on them since the first Arctic frost succeeded the last metamorphic fire; and even now great ledges are wedged off from the hillsides by the ice, and roll clattering down the slopes into the very midst of the settlement.
Summer comes slowly upon Pröven. When we arrived, the slopes of the hills were heavily patched with snow, and the surface, where it showed itself, was frozen dry. The water-line was toothed with fangs of broken ice, which scraped against the beach as the tides rose and fell; and an iceberg somehow or other had found its way into the little port. It was a harmless lump, too deep sunk to float into dangerous nearness; and its spire rose pleasantly, like a village church.
“July 3. I am writing in the ‘Hosky’ House of Cristiansen. Cristiansen is the Danish governor of Pröven, and this house of Cristiansen is the House of Pröven. Its owner is a simple and shrewd old Dane, hale and vigorous, thirty-one of whose sixty-four winters have been spent within the Arctic circle, north of 70° N. Lord in his lonely region—his four sons and five subordinates, oilmen, the only white faces about him, except when he visits Uppernavik—the good old man has the satisfaction of knowing no superior. His habits are three fourths Esquimaux, one-eighth Danish, and the remainder Prövenish, or peculiarly his own. His wife is a half-breed, and his family, in language and aspect, completely Esquimaux.