Seeing this, we waved our arms to them, beckoning them to approach.

While examining the relics of a past age,--the stone axes, arrow-heads, and maces,--I have often pictured in fancy the barbarous habits, the wild visages, and harsh accents, of prehistoric races,--races living away back at the time when men were just rising above the brute.

In the wild semi-brutish shouts and gesticulations which followed our own gesture of friendliness I seemed to hear and see these wild fancies verified,--verified in a manner I had not supposed it possible to be observed in this age.

And yet here were primitive savages apparently, not fifteen hundred miles in a direct course from our own enlightened city of Boston, where, as we honestly believe, we have the cream (some of it, at least) of the world's civilization.

Reflect on this fact, ye who think the whole earth almost ready for the reign of scientific righteousness! Such an unblessed discord! such a cry of pristine savagery! They came darting up alongside, their great fat, flat, greasy faces, with their little sharp black eyes, looking up to us full of confidence and twinkling with expectation of good bargains.
During our voyage we had got out of our books quite a number of Esquimaux words with their English meanings; but these fellows gabbled so fast, so shockingly indistinct, and ran every thing together so, that we could not gain the slightest idea of what they were saying, further than by the word "_chymo_," which, as we had previously learned, meant _trade_, or _barter_.