THE ARCTIC NIGHT 
81 
Boston and New York time and as the day wore 
on and it got to be 5 :2 4 p. m. I realized that it 
was midnight on Tremont Street and Broadway 
and I thought of the friends who would now be 
seeing the old year out and the new year in. I 
wondered what they thought had become of us on 
the Karluk , and whether the news of our unfore¬ 
seen drift had yet reached them from Stefansson. 
I could picture the carefree throngs in the hotels 
waiting for the lights to go out for the moment of 
midnight and greeting 1914 with a cheer and a 
song. 
We had our own New Year’s celebration, though 
it was only a coincidence that it came on this par¬ 
ticular day, for we had planned a football game on 
the ice when the weather should be good and the 
wind fairly light; New Year’s Day happened to 
be the first good day for it. 
The ball was made of seal-gut, cut into sections 
and sewed up, with surgeon’s plaster over the 
seams. We blew it up with a pipe stem and 
plugged up the hole. To protect the ball we had 
a sealskin casing made to fit it; the result was a 
fairly good ball, constructed on the same principle 
as any college football. 
It was Scotland vs. All-Nations; the game was 
association football, played on a field of regulation 
size laid out on young ice about a foot and a half 
