BY SLEDGE AND KAYAK 3^7 



skins. Our friend, the bag, too, is lying on the top of 

 the bears ; a quantity of wood, consisting of the boards 

 from under the sledges, the snow-shoes and other things, 

 more than half of Blessing's fine medicaments — plaster- 

 of-Paris bandages, soft steam-sterilized gauze bandages, 

 hygroscopic cotton wadding — to say nothing of a good 

 aluminium horizon-glass, rope, our combined frying-pan 

 and melter, half an aluminium cap belonging to the 

 cooker, sheets of German silver, a train-oil lamp of the 

 same, bags, tools, sail-cloth, Finn shoes, our wolfskin 

 fino-erless orloves, also woollen ones, a o-eolos^ical hammer, 

 half a shirt, socks, and other sundries, all strewn about in 

 chaotic confusion. Instead of all these we have an aug- 

 mentation in the form of a sack of dried seal's and bear's 

 flesh and the other half of the aluminium cap full of 

 blubber. We are now thoroughly divested of all super- 

 fluous articles, and there is hardly so much as a bit of 

 wood to be had if one should want a stick to slip through 

 the end of the hauling-rope." 



