Such is the normal winter dress of the Innuit women; and the summer costume, while less characteristic, varies but little in general form from that of the colder months. Their life is monotonous and absolutely tame, according to civilized ideas. They play at times upon the _keeloun_, a kind of tambourine; but as a rule their merrymaking is confined to feasting, and of the conduct at these feasts the less said the better. Monogamy is the rule among the Innuits, and the women are generally affectionate wives and mothers, especially the latter. When Tookoolito and her husband, Ebierbing, visited America in the middle of the late century, they lost their child, "Butterfly," an infant of about a year old, and poor little Tookoolito was inconsolable; she longed to die, that she might find again her lost "Butterfly," and she tended the little grave, made in the burial ground at Groton, Connecticut, with the tenderest care, placing thereon, according to the Innuit superstition, the favorite toys of the little one, that it might have them in its sojourn in the beyond. The love of parents for their children is indeed one of the most pronounced and most estimable traits of the Innuit character.
This brief sketch of the women of the hyperboreans must suffice, for there are more important matters of feminine history demanding attention, and indeed the Innuit culture, if so it may be termed, presents few salient features as to the condition of its women. In status and conditions they occupy a place about midway between the woman of the Indian tribes and her of the lower phases of our own civilization.
Southward now to the land of the mixed blood, where the two ancient enemies, France and England, have joined in a race that owes allegiance to the latter but retains many of the characteristics of the former. To write the history of Canadian women is largely to speak of individuals, since there has been but little alteration or development of conditions of a social nature. Yet some may be noted.
The first settlement of Canada, in which term is of course included Acadia, or, as it is now known, Nova Scotia, was touched by a strange romance. The Sieur de Roberval was on his voyage to join the great Jacques Cartier and with him to found a colony, when he discovered that his niece, Marguerite de Roberval, loved, more fondly than was consistent with the Sieur's conceptions of right, a young cavalier of his company. A lonely island, known as the Isle of Demons, was sighted soon after this discovery was made; and Roberval sternly condemned his niece to perpetual imprisonment on this barren rock. Her lover jumped overboard and swam after his beloved; and together they lived, forgotten of men, on the island, thus founding the first Canadian home. A child was born to them, but it died early, and Marguerite's lover, whose name has not come down to us, soon followed his infant. Marguerite with her own hands hollowed the graves of those she loved, and then she lived on, more lonely than even Alexander Selkirk, on this island which was for her full of terrors, real and imagined; the nature of the latter may be guessed from the name bestowed upon the place. She was clad in skins and learned to use the guns with which, in strange mercy, she had been provided by her uncle; and it was not until more than two years had passed that she was rescued by some Maloine fishermen and found her way to her native land. Here she lived in seclusion until her death, which did not come until she had passed the number of years allotted to man.