OBJECTS OF THE SEASHORE. 
95 
mass by a rapid change- shone out in the clear air, 
white as a snowdrift, and then cohort after cohort 
would float past again in another cloud-like mass. The 
noise, too, of so many wings, and the wild, scared cries 
from a host like this, was much greater than could be 
imagined, much less described in words. The tem¬ 
perature of the water at the surface was 32°, the air 
32-|°- Fahr. 
The beach itself was not without its wonders. Here 
lay scattered an accumulation of flotsam and jetsam, 
curious in their diversity. We picked up the little 
glass floats used by the Norwegian herring fisher¬ 
men for buoying up their drift nets, that had 
evidently drifted from Iceland; bits of whale-boats, 
reduced to matchwood by the frightful action of the 
boisterous seas; fragments of wrecks of ships that 
once fought bravely against the ice, but, beaten at last 
in some dread encounter, everywhere lie shattered 
on these sands; bits of what once had been the masts 
of merchant ships, now fit for nothing but the fire ; 
huge piles of driftwood, once stately trees on the side 
of some Siberian river, torn down by one of those 
periodical inundations which devastate the northern 
lands of the earth, and, hurried along by the torrent, 
floated out into the open seas, where the climate 
is mild enough, and the temperature of the water is 
