and folk-songs, handed down from generation to generation
with the utmost accuracy. In the long night of the Arctic
winter they gathered in their huts to hear strange
monotonous singing by their bards: a kind of low chanting,
very strange to European ears, and intended to imitate
the sounds of nature, the murmur of running waters and
the sobbing of the sea. The Eskimos believed in spirits
and monsters whom they must appease with gifts and
incantations. They thought that after death the soul
either goes below the earth to a place always warm and
comfortable, or that it is taken up into the cold forbidding
brightness of the polar sky. When the aurora borealis,
or Northern Lights, streamed across the heavens, the
Eskimos thought it the gleam of the souls of the dead
visible in their new home.

Farthest east of all the British North American Indians
were the Beothuks. Their abode was chiefly Newfoundland,
though they wandered also in the neighbourhood of the
Strait of Belle Isle and along the north shore of the
Gulf of St Lawrence. They were in the lowest stage of
human existence and lived entirely by hunting and fishing.
Unlike the Eskimos they had no dogs, and so stern were
the conditions of their life that they maintained with
difficulty the fight against the rigour of nature. The
early explorers found them on the rocky coasts of Belle
Isle, wild and half clad. They smeared their bodies with
red ochre, bright in colour, and this earned for them
the name of Red Indians. From the first, they had no
friendly relations with the Europeans who came to their