TRAVEL TO OBSERVATORY. 
167 
taking it by turns; and, when twenty-four hours are 
over, tei’m-day is over too. 
“We have such frolics every week. I have just been 
relieved from one, and after a few hours am to be called 
out of bed in the night to watch and dot again. I have 
been engaged in this way when the thermometer gave 
20° above zero at the instrument, 20° below at two 
feet above the floor, and 43° below at the floor itself: 
on my person, facing the little lobster-red fury of a 
stove, 94° above; on my person, away from the stove, 
10° below zero. ‘A grateful country’ will of course 
appreciate the value of these labors, and, as it cons 
over hereafter the four hundred and eighty results 
which go to make up our record for each week, will 
never think of asking ‘Cui bono all this?’ 
“But this is no adventure. The adventure is the 
travel to and fro. We have night now only half the 
time; and half the time can go and come with eyes to 
help us. It -was not so a little while since. 
“Taking an ice-pole in one hand, and a dark-lan¬ 
tern in the other, you steer through the blackness for 
a lump of greater blackness, the Fern Rock knob. 
Stumbling over some fifty yards, you come to a wall: 
your black knob has disappeared, and nothing but gray 
indefinable ice is before you. Turn to the right; 
plant your pole against that inclined plane of slippery 
smoothness, and jump to the hummock opposite: it is 
the same hummock you skinned your shins upon the 
last night you were here. Now wind along, half ser¬ 
pentine, half zigzag, and you cannot mistake that 
