296 
FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
own crowned head, and then we drank success to Nansen 
and his bold adventure. . . . 
Once before I joined in a toast to Royalty in circum- 
stances even more peculiar than these — in Paris, in Les 
Invalides. 
Rather a sudden leap this from the Antarctic to Paris, 
but please allow me a little change of scene ; it is so 
tedious always writing about snow, and mist, and bleed- 
ing seals. 
C, an artist, and I were at the above School of De- 
pravity on a Sunday in February. We had been trying 
very hard and very long to learn to draw, and were tired 
in spirit, and did not know what to do. 'Let's go to 
Les Invalides,' said C, and I also said * Let's go,' for it 
was a splendid idea — nobody having been there before 
that we knew of. 
The dome of Les Invalides looks pretty in the distance, 
especially when you see the gold against a grey wintry 
sky, with a few brown leaves dangling on the button-wood 
branches in the foreground ; but inside it is a sepulchre, a 
deserted barrack, as chilling and wet as a sea fog. 
We mooned round it for an hour or two, and interested 
ourselves slightly in the armour room, and then asked an 
old man who the statue of the little man with the cocked 
hat in the courtyard was supposed to be ; when he said 
Napoleon, we feebly asked him who that was, and if he was 
dead, and the old man seemed to be as depressed with the 
antiquity of our joke as we were ourselves with the dismal 
surroundings. Just as we were going out, however, we 
lighted on something really interesting, that brought up 
