Though Bridie’s interests were myriad her chief delight was the job of piloting visitors around town. She invited them for a cup of tea or a mouthful of sherry in her cluttered one-room apartment at the Ice Palace. She loved company, she loved Baranof, she loved life. Ott Decker said that to hear her carry on you’d think Alaska was the Promised Land with built-in refrigeration. She talked. She talked incessantly with an enthusiasm that was contagious. In fifty years of Alaska she had seen the worst and the best of it. She held forth to strangers, to friends of half a century. As she talked, her elaborately coiffed steel-gray hair and her blue eyes and her good clear skin seemed to give off sparks. She always spoke of Alaska as We.

“We’re one fifth the size of the whole United States, did you know that, now? And two times the size of that little bitty Texas they’re always yawping about. And bigger than a whole parcel of European countries put together. Folks don’t know. Folks Outside just don’t know a thing. Ignorant as moose. Here in Baranof and Anchorage and Fairbanks and Nome and even towns more north it’s no colder than towns in Finland and Norway and Sweden and Denmark—let alone that Russia. But all those millions of American tourists traveling over there, you don’t hear them complaining about those places being cold or uncomfortable. Oh, my, no! They’re quaint and novel and so different, and the scenery! And here we are, a mass of beauty, can you picture now what any of those countries in Europe would give for a grand big lovely rich place like Alaska! The highest mountain, old Mount McKinley. And Matanuska Valley can grow you the biggest cabbages in the world, let alone strawberries and potatoes and greens and grains. And you could graze cattle by the million but those witless ones in Washington won’t let us own the land, let alone work it. Look at it! Sun all day and all night, summertime, and you feel as if you’d had two glasses of good dry champagne.”

“Mosquitoes?” her listener might venture, timidly.

“Who minds a mosquito now and then! It’s exercise. Winters you relax and enjoy your home and your friends and read, and just when you’re beginning to be tired of all that comfort, why, next thing you know the ice goes out with a bang—and it’s spring. But who owns us! They do. Outside. They get the good of it all. And what did it cost back there in ’67 when that Seward pulled a fast one on Russia? Seven million dollars, can you fancy that! For the most wonderful darlingest richest chunk of land in the world. Seven million dollars! I could die laughing. Why, they lay that down as first payment on a fifty-foot corner lot in New York City.”

Her hearers, now taking a bedazzled glance around the unkempt little town, would wag their heads feebly, whether in exhaustion or admiration or conviction. “Sure is. Sure do. Well, that’s mighty interesting. Whew!”