SMALL WATERS AND TYPICAL DAYS 63 



The young man received the order to go home 

 with a delight which his chattering teeth could not 

 conceal. It took him some minutes to pull to land, 

 and during the transit I satisfied myself that, spite of 

 these Arctic phenomena, there was then no appearance 

 of ice even on the edge of the lake. This might be 

 accounted for by the sun and breeze, but the frost 

 was doing its business surely ; during our brief voyage 

 landwards the dace to which the triangles were fixed 

 became as rigid as a piece of wood ; it rebounded 

 when thrown upon the ground, and everything else 

 had become hardened in proportion. The last glimpse 

 of the quiet water near the bank was of seeming 

 needles sprinkled on the surface, and it was a skim 

 of ice when the packing up was finished. 



The experience of jack fishing when water is 

 frozen varies considerably. Very different in its char- 

 acter was the adventure of myself and the headmaster 

 of one of our grammar schools on a certain Twelfth 

 Day, a day of erratic fog after a week of muggy 

 mildness, and a green Christmas with south-westerly 

 winds. The night before our expedition a change 

 was heralded by a huge globe of orange-coloured 

 flame sinking in the west, and a suspicious bright- 

 ness about the stars overhead. When, next morning, 



