FROZEN STORES. 
259 
and a man's breath looked like the firing of a pistol 
on a small scale. 
"All our eatables became laughably consolidated, 
and after different fashions, requiring no small expe- 
rience before we learned to manage the peculiarities 
of their changed condition. Thus, dried apples be- 
came one solid breccial mass of impacted angularities, 
a conglomerate of sliced chalcedony. Dried peaches 
the same. To get these out of the barrel, or the barrel 
out of them, was a matter impossible. We found, aft- 
er many trials, that the shortest and best plan was to 
cut up both fruit and barrel by repeated blows with a 
heavy axe, taking the lumps below to thaw. Saur- 
kraut resembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A crow- 
bar with chiseled edge extracted the lamince badly ; 
but it was perhaps the best thing we could resort to. 
" Sugar formed a very funny compound. Take q. s> 
of cork raspings, and incorporate therewith another 
q. s. of liquid gutta percha or caoutchouc, and allow to 
harden : this extemporaneous formula will give you 
the brown sugar of our winter cruise. Extract with 
the saw ; nothing but the saw will suit. Butter and 
lard, less changed, require a heavy cold chisel and 
mallet. Their fracture is conchoidal, with hsematitic 
(iron-ore pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little 
change, and molasses can at —28° be half scooped, 
half cut by a stiff iron ladle. 
"Pork and beef are rare specimens of Florentine 
mosaic, emulating the lost art of petrified visceral mon- 
strosities seen at the medical schools of Bologna and 
Milan : crow-bar and handspike ! for at —80° the axe 
can hardly chip it, A ba,rrel sawed in half, and kept 
for two days in the caboose house at +76°, was still 
as refractory as flint a few inches below the surface. 
