THE NEW YEAR, i8<^6 4^3 



a sheer impossibility as regards our clothes. We tried 

 all possible ways; we washed them both in Eskimo 

 fashion and in our own ; but neither was of much avail. 

 We boiled our shirts in the pot hour after hour, but took 

 them out only to find them just as full of grease as 

 when we put them in. Then we took to wringing the 

 train-oil out of them. This was a little better ; but the 

 only thing that produced any real effect was to boil them, 

 and then scrape them with a knife while they were still 

 warm. By holding them in our teeth and our left hand 

 and stretching them out, while we scraped them all 

 over with the right hand, we managed to get amazing 

 cjuantities of fat out of them ; and we could almost have 

 believed that they were quite clean when we put them 

 on again after they were dry. The fat which we scraped 

 off was, of course, a welcome addition to our fuel. 



In the meanwhile our hair and beard grew entirely 

 wild. It is true we had scissors and could have cut them ; 

 but as our supply of clothes was by no means too lavish, 

 we thought it kept us a little warmer to have all this hair, 

 which began to flow down over our shoulders. But it 

 was coal-black like our faces, and we thought our teeth 

 and the whites of our eyes shone with an uncanny white- 

 ness, now that we could see each other again in the day- 

 light of the spring. On the w4iole, however, we were 

 so accustomed to each other's appearance that we really 

 found nothino- remarkable about it ; and not until we fell 

 in with other people and found that they were precisely 



