"What a nice place we live in!" thought Sammy. "I wouldn't live in Denmark for anything, old Denmark, where our rulers come from."
The scenery about the Greenland village was indeed interesting. There was the blue sea before it, dotted with "pond-lilies." Off the mouth of the harbor, the icebergs went sailing by, so white, so stately, so slow, like a fleet almost becalmed. Back of the village swelled the rocky cliffs bare of snow now, and many rivulets went flashing down their sides from ponds and pools nestling in granite recesses. Away off, towered the mountains, their still snowy tops suggesting the powdered heads of grand old Titans sitting there in state.
"Who wouldn't live in Greenland?" thought Sammy, entirely forgetting the long, cold, dark winter.
However, it was summer then. He went back of his mother's seal-skin tent. There he could see a
beautiful valley in the shadow of the cliffs. Moss and grasses thickly carpeted it. Little brooks went sparkling through it. There were flowers in bloom, poppies of gold, dandelions and buttercups, saxifrages of purple, white and yellow. "And trees were there?" asks a reader. Do you see that shrub just before Sammy? That is the nearest thing to a tree. It is pine. If the fat for cooking the dinner should give out, young Miss Seal may be warmed up by the help of this giant pine. As a rule, we are inclined to think that Sammy takes his seal same as folks who like "oysters on the shell"—raw.
"Ky-ey! Ky-ey!"
"My!" exclaimed Sammy. "What is that noise? It must be a dog somewhere—hurt!"
Sammy started to the rescue.
"Ky-ey! Ky-ey!"
"It must be a dog," declared Sammy, and he expected to see one of those large Greenland dogs, wolf-like, with sharp, pointed nose, and ears held up stiff as if to catch every sound of danger in their dangerous travels.