I 
WINTERY SIGNS. 231 
the sun, with, prismatic coloring, but without the cir- 
cular and radial appearances that had characterized it 
before. On the 27th, a partial paraselene was visible, 
the first we observed — merely the limbs of two broken 
arcs, destitute of prismatic tint, stretching like circum- 
flexes at about . 23° distance on each side the moon ; 
the moon about 20° high, thermometer —10°, barom- 
eter 30° 55', atmosphere hazy. The sky clearing short- 
ly afterward, it shone out with increased beauty for a 
while, but died away as the haze disappeared. 
The thermometer was now generally below the zero 
point, sometimes rising for a little while about noon a 
few degrees above it, once only as high as + 13°. When 
there was no wind, even the lowest of its range was 
quite bearable ; and while we were exercising active- 
ly, it was difficult to believe that our sensations could 
be so strikingly in contrast with the absolate temper- 
ature. But a breeze, or a pause of motion till we 
could raise the sextant to a star or make out some 
changing phasis of the ice-field, never failed to per- 
suade us, and that feelingly, that the mercury was 
honest. Night after night the bed-clothes froze at our 
feet ; and a poor copy of the New York Herald, that lay 
at the head of the captain's bunk, was glazed with ice. 
November 8. Tempted by the over-arching beauty 
of the sky, I started off this morning with Captain De 
Haven on a walk of inspection shoreward. The open 
water, frozen since October 2d, is now nearly two feet 
thick, and at this low temperature (—15°) it becomes 
hard and brittle as glass. Wherever the nipping has 
caught two of the floes, they have been driven with a 
force inconceivable one above the other, rising and 
falling until they now form a ridge fifteen or twenty 
feet high. 
