obliged us to haul up on the drifting ice. We were thus carried to the northward, and lost about twenty miles. My party, much overworked, felt despondingly the want of the protection of the land-floes.

Nevertheless, I held to my purpose, steering SSW, as nearly as the leads would admit, and looking constantly for the thinning out of the pack that hangs around the western water. Although the low diet and exposure to wet had again reduced our party, there was no apparent relaxation of energy; and it was not until some days later that I found their strength seriously giving way.

It is a little curious that the effect of a short allowance of food does not show itself in hunger. The first symptom is a loss of power, often so imperceptibly brought on that it becomes evident only by accident. I well remember our look of blank amazement as, one day, the order being given to haul the "Hope” over a tongue of ice, we found that she would not budge. At first I thought it was owing to the wetness of the snow-covered surface in which her runners were; but, as there was a heavy gale blowing outside, and I was extremely anxious to get her on to a larger floe to prevent being drifted off, I lightened her cargo and set both crews upon her. In the land of promise, off Crimson Cliffs, such a force would have trundled her like a wheelbarrow: we could almost have borne her upon our backs. Now, with incessant labour and standing-hauls, she moved at a snail's pace.

The "Faith" was left behind, and barely escaped destruction. The outside pressure cleft the floe asunder, and we saw our best boat, with all our stores, drifting rapidly from us. The sight produced an almost hysterical impression upon our party. Two days of want of bread, I am sure, would have destroyed us; and we had now left us but eight pounds of shot in all. To launch the "Hope" again, and rescue her comrade or share her fortunes, would have been the instinct of other circumstances; but it was out of the question now. Happily, before we had time to ponder our loss, a flat cake of ice eddied round near the floe we were upon; M'Gary and myself sprang to it at the moment, and succeeded in floating it across the chasm in time to secure her. The rest of the crew rejoined her by only scrambling over the crushed ice as we brought her in at the hummock-lines.

Things grew worse and worse with us; the old difficulty of breathing came on again, and our feet swelled to such an extent

that we were obliged to cut open our canvas boots. But the symptom which gave me most uneasiness, was our inability to sleep. A form of low fever which hung by us when at work had been kept down by the thoroughness of our daily rest: all my hopes of escape were in the refreshing influences of the halt.

It must be remembered that we were now in the open bay, in the full line of the great ice-drift to the Atlantic, and in boats so frail and unseaworthy as to require constant baling to keep them afloat.

It was at this crisis of our fortunes that we saw a large seal floating-as is the custom of these animals- -on a small patch of ice, and seemingly asleep. It was an ussuk, and so large that I at first mistook it for a walrus. Signal was made for the "Hope" to follow astern, and, trembling with anxiety, we prepared to crawl down upon him.

Petersen, with the large English rifle, was stationed in the bow, and stockings were drawn over the oars as mufflers. As we neared the animal, our excitement became so intense that the men could hardly keep stroke. I had a set of signals for such occasions, which spared us the noise of the voice; and when about three hundred yards off, the oars were taken in, and we moved on in silence with a single scull astern.

He was not asleep, for he reared his head when we were almost in rifle shot; and to this day I can remember the hard, careworn, almost despairing expression of the men's thin faces as they saw him move their lives depended on his capture.

I depressed my hand nervously, as a signal for Petersen to fire. M'Gary hung upon his oar, and the boat, slowly but noiselessly sagging ahead, seemed to me within certain range. Looking at Petersen, I saw that the poor fellow was paralyzed by his anxiety, trying vainly to obtain a rest for his gun against the cutwater of the boat. The seal rose on his fore-flippers, gazed at us for a moment with frightened curiosity, and coiled himself for a plunge. At that instant, simultaneously with the crack of our rifle, he relaxed his long length on the ice, and, at the very brink of the water, his head fell helpless to one side.

I would have ordered another shot, but no discipline could have controlled the men. With a wild yell, each vociferating according to his own impulse, they urged both boats upon the floes. A crowd of hands seized the seal and bore him up to safer ice. The

men seemed half crazy: I had not realized how much we were reduced by absolute famine. They ran over the floe, crying and laughing, and brandishing their knives. It was not five minutes before every man was sucking his bloody fingers or mouthing long strips of raw blubber.

Not an ounce of this seal was lost. The cartilaginous parts of the fore-flippers were cut off in the mêlée, and passed round to be chewed upon; and even the liver, warm and raw as it was, bade fair to be eaten before it had seen the pot. That night, on the large halting-floe, to which, in contempt of the dangers of drifting, we happy men had hauled our boats, two entire planks of the Red Eric were devoted to a grand cooking-fire, and we enjoyed a rare and savage feast.

This was our last experience of the disagreeable effects of hunger. In the words of John Stephenson, "The charm was broken, and the dogs were safe." The dogs I have said little about, for none of us liked to think of them. The poor creatures Toodla and Whitey had been taken with us as last resources against starvation. They were, as M'Gary worded it, “meat on the hoof" and "able to carry their own fat over the floes." Once, near Weary Man's Rest, I had been on the point of killing them ; but they had been the leaders of our winter's team, and we could not bear the sacrifice.

I need not detail our journey any farther. Within a day or two we shot another seal, and from that time forward had a full supply of food.

On the 1st of August we sighted the Devil's Thumb, and were again among the familiar localities of the whaler's battling-ground. The bay was quite open, and we had been making easting for two days before. We were soon among the Duck Islands, and, passing to the south of Cape Shackleton, prepared to land.

“Terra firma ! Terra firma!" How very pleasant it was to look upon, and with what a tingle of excited thankfulness we drew near it! A little time to seek a cove among the wrinkled hills, a little time to exchange congratulations, and then our battered boats were hauled high and dry upon the rocks, and our party, with hearts full of our deliverance, lay down to rest.

And now with the apparent certainty of reaching our homes, came that nervous apprehension which follows upon hope long deferred. I could not trust myself to take the outside passage,

but timidly sought the quiet water channels running deep into the archipelago which forms a sort of labyrinth along the coast.

Two days after this, a mist had settled down upon the islands which embayed us, and when it lifted we found ourselves rowing, in lazy time, under the shadow of Karkamoot. Just then a familiar sound came to us over the water. We had often listened to the screeching of the gulls or the bark of the fox, and mistaken it for the "Huk" of the Esquimaux; but this had about it an inflection not to be mistaken, for it died away in the familiar cadence of a "halloo."

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Listen, Petersen! oars, men! What is it?"—and he listened quietly at first, and then, trembling, said, in a half whisper, "Denmarkers !"

I remember this the first tone of Christian voice which had greeted our return to the world. How we all stood up and peered into the distant nooks; and how the cry came to us again, just as, having seen nothing, we were doubting the whole was not a dream; and then how, with long sweeps, the white ash cracking under the spring of the rowers, we stood for the cape that the sound proceeded from, and how nervously we scanned the green spots which our experience, grown now into instinct, told us would be the likely camping ground of wayfarers.

By-and-by-for we must have been pulling a good half hourthe single mast of a small shallop showed itself; and Petersen, who had been very quiet and grave, burst out into an incoherent fit of crying, only relieved by broken exclamations of mingled Danish and English. ""Tis the Upernavik oil-boat!" he cried; "Carlie Mossyn, the assistant cooper, must be on his road to Kingatok for blubber. The Mariane (the one annual ship) has come, and Carlie Mossyn -" and here he did it all over again, gulping down his words and wringing his hands.

It was Carlie Mossyn, sure enough. The quiet routine of a Danish settlement is the same year after year, and Petersen had hit upon the exact state of things.

Here we first got our cloudy vague idea of what had passed in the big world during our absence. The friction of its fierce rotation had not much disturbed this little outpost of civilization; and we thought it a sort of blunder as he told us that France and England were leagued with the Mussulman against the Greek

Church. He was a good Lutheran, this assistant cooper, and all news with him had a theological complexion.

"What of America? eh, Petersen ?"-and we all looked, waiting for him to interpret the answer.

"America?" said Carlie, " we don't know much of that country here, for they have no whalers on the coast; but a steamer and a barque passed up a fortnight ago, and have gone out into the ice to seek your party.”

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How gently all the lore of this man oozed out of him! he seemed an oracle, as, with hot, tingling fingers pressed against the gunwale of the boat, we listened to his words. Sebastopol ain't taken," said he. Where and what was Sebastopol ? We knew nothing.

"But Sir John Franklin ?" There we were at home again,our own delusive little speciality rose uppermost. Franklin's party, or traces of the dead which represented it, had been found nearly a thousand miles to the south of where we had been searching for them. He knew it; for the priest had a German newspaper which told all about it. And so we "out oars again," and rowed into the fogs.

Another sleeping halt has passed, and we have all washed clean at the fresh water basins and furbished up our ragged furs and woollens. The snow top of Sanderson's Hope shows itself above the mists, and we hear the yelling of the dogs. Petersen had been foreman of the settlement; and he calls my attention, with a sort of pride, to the tolling of the workmen's bell. It is six o'clock. We are nearing the end of our trials. Can it be a dream?

We hugged the land by the big harbour, turned the corner by the old brew-house, and, in the midst of a crowd of children, hauled our boats for the last time upon the rocks.

For eighty-four days we had lived in the open air. Our habits were hard and weather-worn. We could not remain within the four walls of a house without a distressing sense of suffocation. But we drank coffee that night before many a hospitable threshold, and listened again and again to the hymn of welcome, which, sung by many voices, greeted our deliverance.

Arctic Explorations.