THE WORLD OF ICE. 318

tainment to our readers, so we will cut Isobel’s letter
short at this point.

“Cap’n’s ready to go aboord, sir,’ said O’Riley,
touching his cap to Captain Ellice while he was yet
engaged in discussing the letter with his son.

“Very good.”

“ An’, plaze sir, av yell take the throuble to look
in at Mrs. Meetuck in passin’, it'll do yer heart good,
ib will”

“Very well, we'll look in,” replied the captain as he
quitted the house of the worthy pastor.

The personage whom O'Riley chose to style Mrs.
Meetuck was Meetuck’s grandmother. That old lady
was an Esquimau, whose age might be algebraically
expressed as an unknown quantity. She lived in a
boat turned upside down, with a small window in the
bottom of it, and a hole in the side for a door. When
Captain Ellice and Fred looked in, the old woman,
who was a mere mass of bones and wrinkles, was
seated on a heap of moss beside a fire, the only
chimney to which was a hole in the bottom of the
boat. In front of her sat her grandson Meetuck, and
on a cloth spread out at her feet were displayed all
the presents with which that good hunter had been
loaded by his comrades of the Dolphin. Meetuck’s
mother had died many years before, and all the affec-
tion in his naturally warm heart was transferred to,
and centred upon, his old grandmother. Meetuck’s
chief delight in the gifts he received was in sharing
them, as far as possible, with the old woman. We say