STORM-STAYED. 301 



The track before me looks impromising enough. 

 After the party was housed, I chmbed up to a consid- 

 erable eminence, and have had the melancholy satis- 

 faction of looking out over the ugliest scene that my 

 eye has ever chanced to rest upon. There was noth- 

 ing inviting in it. Except a few miles of what has 

 evidently, up to a very late period of the fall, been 

 open water, which has frozen suddenly, there is not a 

 rod of smooth ice in sight. The whole Sound appears 

 to have been filled with ice of the most massive de- 

 scription, which, broken up into a moving " pack " in 

 the summer, has come down upon this Greenland 

 coast with the southerly setting current, and has piled 

 up all over the sea in a confused jumble. I know 

 what it is from having crossed it in 1854 ; and if it 

 is as bad now as then (and it appears to be much 

 worse) there is every prospect of a severe tussle. 



April 7th. 



Did anybody ever see such capricious weather as 

 this of Smith Sound ? It is the torment of my life 

 and the enemy of my plans. I can never depend 

 upon it. It is the veriest flirt that ever owned Dame 

 Nature for a mother. 



We camped in a calm atmosphere, but in the mid- 

 dle of the night — bang ! — down came a bugle-blast 

 of Boreas, and then the old god blew and blew as if he 

 had never blown in all his life before, and wanted 

 to prove what he could do. We could hardly show 

 our noses out of doors, and have lain huddled to- 

 gether in this snow den all day, — a doleful sort 

 of imprisonment. It is with much difficulty that 

 we have got any thing to eat, and we never should if 

 I had not turned cook myself, and shown these inno- 



