LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS, 
303 
mound of ice, with perhaps a bear as their companion, and the 
howling of the wolves to convince them that they were not the 
only animated beings in that desolate part of the country. 
The vessel was on this day visited by two women, one man, 
and two children, bringing with them for sale some shoes, 
the skin of a young seal, and some dried trout. The articles 
were all purchased by Capt. Ross, and the latter formed for 
some time no unsubstantial appendage to his breakfast table, 
although, it must be acknowledged that the appetite must be 
of a very peculiar kind that could accommodate itself to be 
satisfied with viands prepared by hands, which may literally 
be said to be encrusted with the dirt, which has clung to them 
from their infancy, and by people, with whom even the slightest 
degree of cleanliness is never known. 
It was however a discovery which Capt. Ross had made long 
before he was visited by the Esquimaux, in Victory Harbour, that 
every thing has an inside and an outside. The interior of an 
egg cannot be defiled, even if the egg itself passes through the 
filthiest hands, and analogically arguing, Capt. Ross satisfied, 
himself with the thought, that although some very unpleasant 
associations might accompany the exterior of the trout, it did 
not follow that those same associations extended to the interior. 
He also considered his own person as a very substantial prop to 
the soundness of that argument, for on looking at it from any of 
the two and thirty points of the compass, it does not present the 
most pleasing and prepossessing exterior, but then, when we con¬ 
sider the interior, we find much to approve of and esteem, for if 
the mind be the standard of the man, no one will deny that 
Capt. Ross stands high in the scale. We write from the inform¬ 
ation of others, not from any extensive personal knowledge ; our 
authorities are in existence, and can be appealed to for the 
veracity of our statements, but if at any time, we have cracked 
the satiric thong too smartly, it has been done more in pity than 
in anger, that an individual who, in many respects, possesses a 
great and noble mind, should in some instances have shown him¬ 
self the slave to certain passions, which are the distinguishing 
traits of the mean and the ignoble one. 
