ARCTIC FOOD. 
CHAPTER XXX. 
I EMPLOYED the dreary intervals of leisure that her- 
alded our Christmas in tracing some Flemish portrait- 
ures of things about me. The scenes themselves had 
interest at the time for the parties who figured in them ; 
and I believe that is reason enough, according to the 
practice of modern academics, for submitting them to 
the public eye. I copy them from my scrap-hook, ex- 
purgating only a little. 
“ e have almost reached the solstice ; and things 
are so quiet that I may as well, before I forget it, tell 
you something about the cold in its sensible effects, 
and the way in which as sensible people we met it. 
“You will see, by turning to the early part of my 
journal, that the season we now look hack upon as 
the perfection of summer contrast to this outrageous 
Avinter was in fact no summer at all. We had the 
young ice forming round us in Baffin’s Bay, and were 
measuring snow-falls, while you were sweating under 
your grass-cloth. Yet I remember it as a time of sun- 
ny recreation, when we shot bears upon the floes, and 
R 
