OUR COOKS. 
309 
"Walked with our other cook, Auguste Canot. 
Queer changes these Frenchmen see ! Canot's father, 
a captain in the French army, was shot while serving 
with Oudinot, beneath the infernal ' harricades ' of 
Rome — Canot the younger looking on. A few months 
after, the son had figured upon the list of condemned 
for the affair at Lyons, and was a fugitive emigre to 
the United States. The same sergeant-major, Canot, 
is now cooking salt junk in Baffin's Bay. His con- 
frere, the modest hut gifted Henri, although a worse 
soldier, is a hotter cook. He first saw ice among 
the glaciers of La Tour. He has scuUionized at the 
' Trois Freres,^ and played chef to a London club- 
house. He passed through this latter ordeal, strange 
to say, unscathed ; and, but for an amorous tempera- 
ment, might be now at Delmonico's, upon good wages 
and bad Bordeaux. Henri is a boy of talent, pen- 
sive by temperament, and withal ambitious. Were 
it not for the somewhat unequal distribution of two 
molars and an incisor, his entire stock of teeth, he 
would be an insufferable coxcomb. As it is, he treats 
his infirmity with amiable, if not philosophic con- 
tempt. He made me this morning an idea of white 
bear's liver, a la hrochette. The idea was good, the 
liver hippuric and detestable. Henri prides himself 
upon that most difficult simplicity, the Jilet. He pre- 
pares thus a sea-gull a merveille. 
^^February 28, Friday. The most wintery-looking 
day I have ever seen. The winds have been let loose, 
and the cheering novelty of a northwester breaks in 
on our calm. The drifting snow either rises like smoke 
from the levels, or whirls away in wreaths from the 
hummocks. The atmosphere has an opaline ashy 
look ; in the midst of which, like a huge girasole, flash- 
