The large boys catch fish and hunt seal. They even help to kill great whales and fierce white bears.
But what does the little Eskimo girl do? The little sister learns to sew and to make clothes out of skins. She makes her own needle from a hard bone or a piece of iron, and she twists thread from strips of deerskin. Everything the Eskimos use they make with their own hands.
Sometimes our ships force their way through the frozen ocean to their land of ice and snow. The Eskimo people think these great ships the most wonderful things they have ever seen.
[THE NORTHERN SEAS]
Up! up! let us a voyage take;
Why sit we here at ease?
Find us a vessel tight and snug,
Bound for the northern seas.
I long to see the Northern Lights,
With their rushing splendors, fly,
Like living things, with flaming wings,
Wide o'er the wondrous sky.
I long to see those icebergs vast,
With heads all crowned with snow,
Whose green roots sleep in the awful deep,
Two hundred fathoms low.