would call bright. The tempered sunshine sifting through the moist
atmosphere makes no dazzling glare, and the town, like the landscape,
rests beneath a hazy, hushing, Indian-summerish spell. On the longest
days the sun rises about three o'clock, but it is daybreak at
midnight. The cocks crowed when they woke, without reference to the
dawn, for it is never quite dark; there were only a few full-grown
roosters in Wrangell, half a dozen or so, to awaken the town and give
it a civilized character. After sunrise a few languid smoke-columns
might be seen, telling the first stir of the people. Soon an Indian
or two might be noticed here and there at the doors of their barnlike
cabins, and a merchant getting ready for trade; but scarcely a sound
was heard, only a dull, muffled stir gradually deepening. There were
only two white babies in the town, so far as I saw, and as for Indian
babies, they woke and ate and made no crying sound. Later you might
hear the croaking of ravens, and the strokes of an axe on firewood.
About eight or nine o'clock the town was awake. Indians, mostly
women and children, began to gather on the front platforms of the
half-dozen stores, sitting carelessly on their blankets, every other
face hideously blackened, a naked circle around the eyes, and perhaps
a spot on the cheek-bone and the nose where the smut has been rubbed
off. Some of the little children were also blackened, and none were
over-clad, their light and airy costume consisting of a calico shirt
reaching only to the waist. Boys eight or ten years old sometimes
had an additional garment,--a pair of castaway miner's overalls wide
enough and ragged enough for extravagant ventilation. The larger
girls and young women were arrayed in showy calico, and wore jaunty
straw hats, gorgeously ribboned, and glowed among the blackened and
blanketed old crones like scarlet tanagers in a flock of blackbirds.
The women, seated on the steps and platform of the traders' shops,
could hardly be called loafers, for they had berries to sell,