BAKERS DEATH. 
201 
snow-level to Fern Rock, and, climbing the slope of the 
Observatory, we deposited his corpse upon the pedestals 
which had served to support our transit-instrument • 
and theodolite. We read the service for the burial of 
the dead, sprinkling over him snow for dust, and re¬ 
peated the Lord’s Prayer; and then, icing up again 
the opening in the walls we had made to admit the 
coffin, left him in his narrow house. 
Jefferson Baker was a man of kind heart and true 
principles. I knew him when we were both younger. 
I passed two happy seasons at a little cottage adjoining 
his father’s farm. He thought it a privilege to join 
this expedition, as in those green summer days when 
I had allowed him to take a gun witli me on some 
shooting-party. He relied on me with the affectionate 
confidence of boyhood, and I never gave him a harsh 
word or a hard thought. 
We were watching in the morning at Baker’s death¬ 
bed, when one of our deck-watch, who had been cutting 
ice for the melter, came hurrying down into the cabin 
with the report, “ People hollaing ashore !” I went up, 
followed by as many as could mount the gangway; 
and there they were, on all sides of our rocky harbor, 
dotting the snow-shores and emerging from the black- 
ness of the cliffs,—wild and uncouth, but evidently 
human beings. 
As we gathered on the deck, they rose upon the 
more elevated fragments of the land-ice, standing singly 
and conspicuously like the figures in a tableau ol the 
opei’a, and distributing themselves around almost in a 
