258 
THE COLD. 
were scrani"bling merrily over glaciers and murdering 
rotges in the bright glare of our day-midnight. Like 
a complaining brute, I thought it cold then — I, who 
am blistered if I touch a brass button or a ramrod 
without a woolen mit. 
" The cold came upon us gradually. The first thing 
that really struck me was the freezing up of our wa- 
ter-casks, the drip-candle appearance of the bung-holes, 
and our inability to lay the tin cup down for a five- 
minutes' pause without having its contents made solid. 
Next came the complete inability to obtain drink with- 
out manufacturing it. For a long time we had col- 
lected our water from the beautiful fresh pools of the 
icebergs and floes ; now we had to quarry out the 
blocks in flinty, glassy lumps, and then melt it in tins 
for our daily drink. This was in Wellington Channel. 
"]3y-and-by the sludge which we passed through as 
we traveled became pancakes and snow-balls. We 
were glued up. Yet, even as late as the 11th of Sep- 
tember, I collected a flowering Potentilla from Bar- 
low's Inlet. But now any thing moist or wet began 
to strike me as something to be looked at — a curious, 
out-of-the-way production, like the bits of broken ice 
round a can of mint-julep. Our decks became dry, 
and studded with botryoidal lumps of dirty foot-trod- 
den ice. The rigging had nightly accumulations of 
rime, and we learned to be careful about coiled ropes 
and iron work. On the 4th of October we had a mean 
temperature below zero. 
" By this time our little entering hatchway had be- 
come so complete a mass of icicles, that we had to give 
it up, and resort to our winter door- way. The opening 
of a door was now the signal for a gush of smoke-like 
vapor : every stove-pipe sent out clouds of purple steam ; 
