WILSON BACONIZES. 
303 
come in the next morning and announce “ ice all round, 
a-all ro-ound!” In a quarter of an hour afterwards, 
all was still on hoard the u Foam /” and the lonely little 
ship lay floating on the glassy bosom of the sea, appa¬ 
rently as inanimate as the landscape. 
My feelings on awakening next morning were very 
pleasant; something like what one used to feel the first 
morning after one’s return from school, on seeing pink 
curtains glistening round one’s head, instead of the 
dirty-white boards of a turn-up bedstead. When 
Wilson came in with my hot water, I could not help 
triumphantly remarking to him,—“Well, Wilson, you 
see we’ve got to Spitzbergen after all!” But Wilson 
was not a man to be driven from his convictions by 
facts; he only smiled grimly, with a look which meant— 
“Would we were safe back again!” Poor Wilson! 
he would have gone only half way with Bacon in his 
famous Apothegm; he would willingly “ commit the 
Beginnings of all actions to Argus, with his hundred 
eyes, and the Ends ”—to Centipede, with his hundred 
legs. “ First to watch, and then to speed”— away! 
would have been his pithy emendation. 
Immediately after breakfast we pulled to the shore, 
