TILE SPITZBERGEN SWINDLE. 5 



stirring sounds, in the restful quiet of the 

 forest and the silence of the mountain side. 



The year before, a neatly worded adver- 

 tisement had tempted me to join an expedi- 

 tion towards the North Pole in company wdth 

 about a score of other trastful Englishmen 

 and women. We were to stay seventeen days 

 at Spitzbergen, and slay white bears and 

 walrus and reindeer. Those for whom a 

 forty-pound salmon could not afford sufficient 

 excitement w^ere to help man the whale-boat, 

 and assist in the capture of the leviathan him- 

 self. But the expedition had resulted in 

 failure ; the seventeen days had been curtailed 

 to three, and my own visions of ice-bears and 

 remdeer had ended almost as disastrously as 

 the dreams of the Isaac Walton of our party, 

 who had come armed with a vast supply of 

 mighty salmon rods, and furnished with great 

 stores of wondrously coloured flies (made 

 after a pattern supplied by the arch humbug 



