THE FLOE-ICE. I 55 



" gutter ;" the woman or maiden thus styled slits up the 

 belly, tears out, like an augur of old, the entrails, but 

 doesn't stop to inspect them, throws the livers into a 

 hogshead, and the disembowelled fish to the " splitter ;" 

 another girl or woman grown, known by wearing a mit- 

 ten on the left hand, who attacks the fish on the reverse 

 side from the "gutter," makes a deep cut along each 

 side of the back-bone, dexterously but with her mittened 

 sinistral hand shies that important part of the fish's 

 skeleton into the harbor, while the fish, after receiving 

 this threefold treatment, is emphatically slapped into a 

 sled-barrow and carried to the other end of the low 

 shed to be salted, when it is ready for the flakes. 



While on shore we saw at one of the houses a musk- 

 rat's skin, which had a much better, finer fur than those 

 at home. 



On the 12th the wind veered from the north to the 

 northeast, and it lighted up so decidedly towards noon 

 that we hoped to get to sea. After dinner, Mr. Brad- 

 ford went out in the whale-boat to get a view of an ice- 

 berg, which he sketched from afar off. It was sur- 

 rounded by cakes of floe-ice, which assumed a wonderful 

 individuality. One in particular impressed itself on my 

 memory : it was a lily done in ice, which nodded and 

 swayed to and fro in the gentle ocean swell like a 

 veritable flower moved by a summer's breeze ; another 

 was like a woman's torso : and so passed in review a 

 series of animal and plant-like forms of every conceiva- 

 ble shape, while mingled with the white ice were smaller 

 pieces of dark, colorless ice which may have been sev- 

 ered from some arctic glacier. But before the artist's 

 study was fairly made, the insidious northeastern breeze 



