Rigorists

“We saw reindeer

browsing,”a friend who’d been in Lapland, said:

“finding their own food; they are adapted

to scant reino Reino

or pasture, yet they can run eleven

 miles in fifty minutes; the feet spread when

the snow is soft,

and act as snowshoes. They are rigorists,

however handsomely cutwork artists

of Lapland and

Siberia elaborate the trace

or saddle-girth with saw-tooth leather lace.

One looked at us

With its firm face part brown, part white,－a queen

of alpine flowers. Santa Claus’ reindeer, seen

at last, had grey-

brown fur, with a neck like edelweiss or

Lion’s foot,－leontopodium more

exactly.”and

this candelabrum-headed omament

for a place where ornaments are scarce, set

to Alaska,

was a gift preventing the extinction

of the Esquimo. The battle was won

by a quiet man,

Sheldon Jackson, evangel to that race

Whose reprieve he read in the reindeer’s face.