440 ADVENTURE IN THE SLUDGE. 
SO fond of for their scenes of diablerie, without one ray 
in sympathy with the cheering- verdure of vegetation. 
I have never witnessed the same effect in nature. 
They were pleasant things these rambles on the ice 
with our new colleagues, and I should be sorry to for- 
get them ; but they were sometimes less poetical than 
the one I have been speaking of. There was a part 
of the ice-field that extended between the two vessels, 
which we had nicknamed the Albert Floe. A part of 
this had been broken up by the swell, and a space of 
some hundreds of yards close by us was filled up for 
the time with shreed, forming a floating platform of 
tesselated structure, but without a cement. Mr. Ken- 
nedy and M. Bellot were on their way to visit us, and 
had just reached this uncertain pathway. Know- 
ing the difiiculties they might encounter in the tran- 
sit, and somewhat vain, I fear, of my own ice-craft, I 
took a boat-hook and started ofi" to meet them. The 
ice happened not to be conveniently arranged for my 
progress in a direct line; and at the best of times it 
requires the composure of a well-balanced mind to 
make long leaps from one slippery fragment to anoth- 
er, especially when the dark water between is some- 
what cold and deep. I was in a hurry, I suppose; for 
in one of my jumps I damaged the garniture of my 
nether limbs, and was constrained to halt Ion 2" enouofh 
to administer some temporary repairs. It lost me a 
little time; but I jumped along for some hundred yards 
more, and was soon near enough to see M. Bellot up 
to his neck, and Mr. Kennedy trying to fish him out 
with a boat-hook. When I got up to them, which I 
did by a process of ferriage, using little blocks of floe 
for a raft, M. Bellot's Arctic attire presented an ap- 
pearance strikingly aquatic and uncomfortable. "With 
