The Rainbow's End; Alaska (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV THE LITTLE ESKIMO TOWN OF STEBBINS I once knew a man who might have posed, and in sooth did pose, as the Vivian Montmorency of many a young girl's dream. He had large, soulful, appealing eyes, raven hair, long white hands, and a low caressing voice. His name was Wiggins, Abijah Wiggins. For more years than it is polite to remind me of, I had not thought of him until I spent several days in a little out-of-the-way Eskimo village last summer. Neither it nor its inhabitants recalled Abijah because they were in the least soulful or romantic, but because, being so very primitive, so strangely foreign, it seemed the name of the queer little hamlet should sneeze with k-x-y-z's, instead of which it was Stebbins, just plain Stebbins. And the utmost of my inquiry failed to elicit who had been thus immortalized. Stebbins cuddles down behind a rosy sandstone rock, to be sheltered from the piercing winds which blow across Norton Sound, and ambles down to a little sheltered cove quite off the line of travel, indicated by Point Romanoff there in the distance. It is fifteen miles across the island to St. Michael, over peat into which one sinks in many places to his knees. The Stebbinsites despise innovations, and "far from the madding crowd pursue the even tenor of their way." The very idea of one of those Eskimo women, in her dirty trousers and parka and seal boots, mingling in a madding crowd, is irresistibly funny. As a beauty at a matinee, a small luncheon, or a brilliant reception, she would be a lamentable failure, but in her native environment she admirably lives "the life whereunto it hath pleased God to call" her, being in so far more of a success than most of us. I didn't see an idle person in Stebbins, perhaps because it was late in the summer and s...