It is certainly not unthinkable that, if
subject to such a displacement of its centre of gravity, our planet
at some inconceivably remote period capsized, so that what were
before the Tropics became the Poles, and that such a catastrophe is
not only possible but is certain to happen again. As a conjecture it
may be unscientific; but how many of the accepted theories of science
have ceased to be! As a matter of fact, she has been very busy
burying her dead, particularly of late years, and her theory of the
extinction of the primeval elephant may yet prove to be one of them.]
On the 9th the steamer _Grahame_ arrived from Smith's Landing,
bringing with her about 120 baffled Klondikers, returning to
the United States, there being still some sixty more, they
said, down the Mackenzie River, who intended to make their
way out, if possible, before winter. They had a solitary woman
with them who had discarded a duffer husband, and who looked
very self-reliant, indeed, being girt about with bowie-knife
and revolver, but otherwise not alarming.
It was certainly a motley crowd, and some of its members by no
means honest. Chief-factor Camsell, who had just come from Fort
Simpson, told me they had stolen from every house where they had
a chance, and mentioned, amongst other things, a particularly
ungrateful theft of a whip-saw from a native's cabin shortly
after an Indian had, with much pains, overtaken them with a similar
one, which they had lost on the trail.
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