as the ticking of the clock. And then when it had struck, up they'd jump, and sing "Come, let us anew our journey pursue," and when we got outside the church bells were ringing, and everybody was a-shaking hands with everybody else, and wishing of 'em a happy new year, and we'd jolly hot coffee and buttered toast, or else elderwine and seed-cake, when we got home. A different sort of a New-year's Day I spent up in them Arctic regions!

The snow came down as if the whole sky was turned to feathers, and the wind was whirling of it, and the ice was ranging about furious, pressing on the floe and smashing it up, till we thought the bergs was bound to bear down on us, and stave the ship. Then there came a lull again, and everything was as still as death. Chips was up then, and between us we got the boat built. And then poor old Chips came to grief again. Cheery as he was, he couldn't help seeing that he was unlucky.

"It's my belief, doctor," he'd sometimes say, half-laughing, half-earnest, "as I'm the Jonah that has brought all the trouble on the ship."

"Nonsense, man," the doctor would say back to him. "If you'd been Jonah, we'd have taken precious good care to pitch you overboard ever so long ago."

This was Chips's new accident. He'd fired at a blue fox, and the gun burst, and smashed his hand all to bits. Try all the doctor could, the arm

mortified, and the doctor had to cut it off.

Chips

hadn't got strength to bear it; the cold had got into his system, you see.

"I ain't long for this world, doctor," he says. "You've done your best for me, I know, but death 'll beat the best o' doctors some day or other. Good-bye, doctor; good-bye, young un. If you ever get back to Rotherhithe, you'll go to my old woman, won't ye, young un, and tell her that I died loving of her and the kids?"

About half-an-hour afterwards poor Chips did die. The doctor and me carried him up on deck, and there he lay, friz, for a time. We didn't like to get rid of him. But at last the doctor thought it would be better for us to bury him. There'd been a heavy fall of snow, and we put him in it as deep as we could, before it had had time to get hard, and the doctor and me was left alone aboard the Priscilla,

WH

YARN III.

HEN poor old Chips died, we were about fifty miles from land. There were icebergs all about, and they were jamming of us down to the southward. Daylight was lengthening out a bit, but we still had a deal of dark, and 'twas dreary to see the bergs all round us in the dusk. Some of 'em had tops for all the world like the heads of spiteful old men a-laughing; seemed as if they was watching that we shouldn't slip out, and grinning to think how they'd fixed us. Third week in January the sun just peeped like above the horizon. We hadn't seen him for seventy-five days afore. That was a dismal time; dark most part of the twenty-four hours, and when there was any light nothing to be seen but snow and ice, look which way you would. And then it was so awful cold. Sometimes the winds would howl and rush as if they were bound to blow right through your bones, and then there wouldn't be a single sough of wind, and that was colder, and you could hear the bears groaning and the wolves and foxes whining and howling all round in the dark. When I saw the sun again, I plucked up heart a bit, but I

was like a young bear still-most of my troubles was afore me.

We had dreadful weather again after that— tremendous gales, with snow. The drift flew across the ice faster than a railway train. Sometimes the ice would crack for miles-it had run foul, you see, of a berg aground-and then we'd be frozen in again, and so we went on drifting. One day we made out a water-hole, with a dead whale in it. A white bear and two cubs, and a pack of wolves-half-a-dozen, say-and foxes, and Greenland sharks, were feeding on the crang. A greedy beggar is the Greenland shark. You may send your lance right through him, and yet he'll swim back again to what he was feeding on. It's queer he don't tackle men. Your ice-cramps will slip when you're flinching, and you'll tumble into a whole shoal of those beggars, and they'll never make a grab at you, though they'll dig bits as big as a half-quartern loaf out of a whale, dead or alive. They die tremendous hard. The heart will beat for pretty nigh half a day after it's been cut out of the body, and you may cut the body up and the bits will keep on twitching just as long, and if you cut the head off the jaws will keep on snapping.

There was plenty of victuals aboard for a long time, now that there was only two of us, but as we didn't know how long we might be cooped up, we never lost a chance of getting food. So the doctor and I took our guns and lances and the

dogs, and started for the water-hole. I forgot to say that we had two dogs. One had stayed aboard when the ship capsized, the other had gone off with the captain, but had come back to us over the ice. The wolves and the foxes scampered off, but we shot the two cubs, and the dogs tackled the mother bear, and kept her in play till we lanced her. We lanced a lot of the sharks too. A bit after that the dogs ran down a blue fox, without killing him. I got him and took him on board, and there I kept him for ever so long. He had an old biscuit-cask for a kennel, and we made a pet of him, he grew Blue Peter we called him. It was queer that though the dogs were as keen after wild foxes as ever, they never offered to hurt Blue Peter. The doctor made me take as much exercise as he could, and lent me books, and did his best to cheer me up, but when we'd got used like to being frozen in, time used to hang heavy on our hands.

so tame.

So the doctor set both of us to all kinds of jobs. The pumps had frozen, and we did our best to clear them. A good many of the casks had got their heads burst by the water freezing inside 'em, so we smashed up the ice, and mended the casks. There was I that wouldn't be a cooper, doing coopering up in the Arctic regions. I wished myself back in father's yard at Rotherhithe. About the end of February we had an awful scare.' One day we'd seen a huge iceberg, out of sight the biggest we'd seen-as big as a mountain it was—