stratagem and spoil." A rude drum and a monotonous chant, consisting
only of the fundamental note and minor third, are the only things in the
way of music among the more remote settlements of which I have any
knowledge. Mrs. Micawber's singing has been described as the table-beer
of acoustics. Eskimo singing is something more. The beer has become flat
by the addition of ice. One of our engineers, who is quite a fiddler,
experimented on his instrument with a view to seeing what effect music
would have on the "savage breast," but his best efforts at rendering
"Madame Angot" and the "Grande Duchesse" were wasted before an
unsympathetic audience, who showed as little appreciation of his
performance as some people do when listening to Wagner's "Music of the
Future."

Where they have come in contact with civilization their musical taste is
more developed. At Saint Michael's I was told that some of their songs
are so characteristic that it is much to be regretted that some of them
cannot be bottled up in a phonograph and sent to a musical composer. On
the coast of Siberia I heard an Eskimo boy sing correctly a song he had
learned while on board a whaling vessel, and on several of the Aleutian
islands the natives play the accordeon quite well; have music-boxes, and
even whistle strains from "Pinafore."

From music to dancing the transition is obvious, no matter whether the
latter be regarded in a Darwinian sense as a device to attract the
opposite sex or as the expression of joyous excitement. This
manifestation of feeling in its bodily discharge, which Moses and Miriam
and David indulged in, which is ranked with poetry by Aristotle, and
which old Homer says is the sweetest and most perfect of human
enjoyments, is a pastime much in vogue among the Eskimo, and it required
but little provocation to start a dance at any time on the _Corwin's_