irregular broken outline, and might have been a great white city upon a plain. Very menacing it looked to us who had gained our dread of ice in trips across the North Atlantic. But there was reassuring unconcernedness on the part of those who had been in these waters before, especially the captain and the crew.

At midnight I was wakened by the clash of collision and a shudder which went through the vessel like the shake of ague. There was a shouting on the deck, and a loud grating of ice along the vessel's side which sounded like sure destruction. Then followed another clash and quiver and more shouting, but the sense of danger was gone, for it was instantly apparent that we were but forcing a way through the floe. It was interesting then to wait for the moment of impact, and the jar which set the vessel trembling in every fiber, and the heave as her bows rose upon an obstructive pan, and the thunder of the pack along her sides, and over all the crescendo of shouting.

Soon it became intelligible. "Starboard!" came faintly from the forward crow's-nest, whence the mate was picking a course through the floe. "Starboard!!" next in a ringing order from the captain on the bridge. "Starboard !!!" finally in a prolonged response from the two men at the wheel at the head of the companionway. Then, "Steady!"

forward from aloft, and "Stead-e-e!!" from the bridge, and a long-drawn "Stead-e-e-e-e!!!" from the men, as the wheel whiled under the release of tension.

From the deck, in the morning, the ship appeared to be imprisoned in a sea of ice; not the black-blue ice of a fresh-water lake, but ice of unspotted white like that of a glacier. In masses of irregular size, known to the sealers as "pans, and of relatively flat surface, it floated about us, broken in uniformity only here and there by the towering bulk of an iceberg. On every side it spread to the horizon, with threadlike branching blue veins of open water among the pans widening now and again to pools that in the sunlight were sapphires set among diamonds.

The Diana was having much her own way in a fast-melting summer floe, that drifts from Hudson Bay in the southward Labrador current. Had it been winter, and had she been nipped in the pack and exposed to its terrible lateral pressure, she would have been crushed like an eggshell between the lips of a vise.

In the middle of the morning the sharp eyes of the watch caught sight of open water ahead, and at little after noon we steamed clear of the ice and again set a straight northeasterly course.

One day more of calm and of sunlit seas, then two

of dark, tempestuous weather, with dire discomfort in Davis Strait, and we wakened on Saturday to the welcome sense of an even keel.

Icebergs were many about us. surfaces the sun was breeding a fog

From their cold

which, even as I

watched, shut out the land, and veiled us in a mist through which we could see only a hundred yards across the water. Overhead was clear sky, and in the dense fog to port was a luminous point formed by the sun rays in the mist. This the seamen called a "fog eater." But the promise of clearing which it held was borne out in the course of the morning only by an occasional thinning of the fog, through which we caught furtive glimpses of the mountain tops, with their heights vastly exaggerated, as they appeared above the denser mist that hid the shore.

There is an element of adventure in cruising at full speed in a thick fog along an ill-charted coast, in waters frequented by icebergs as large as St. Peter's Cathedral. We were headed shoreward in the hope of soon running free of fog. From out our easeful attitudes in the sunlight we started suddenly as one man. It was to the call of the captain, who was standing now at the head of the port ladder leading to the bridge, his face livid and his figure bent tensely forward. "Hard a-starboard! Hard a-starboard!" he was shouting in a voice that carried

conviction. In an instant the spokes of the double wheel were thick with hands that urged it over at all speed. With the sensitiveness almost of a skiff the Diana responded, sweeping, in a great curve, to port, while off our starboard, so near that we could almost toss a biscuit upon it from the deck, rose the ragged peak of a rock projecting a few feet above the water that played about it in dancing ripples.

As suddenly as it closed about us in the early morning the fog lifted in the later afternoon, revealing the coast line through an atmosphere of singular clearness. The sun was late in setting that night. For more than a week we had marked the lengthening days, and it was in keeping with our general good fortune that, in the few hours of darkness each night, the moon should give us ample light until we reached a point where, at that season, the sun would not set at all. It came slowly to its setting now, sloping obliquely well to the north of west, and shedding, far into the night, its level rays across the sea. A faint breeze was blowing from the north, cold from off an ice-cold sea, but surcharged with a quality of vigor that set one's blood bounding. The wind ruffled the placid water as it reflected the red and gold and orange and purple of a sunset which framed the icebergs and the distant snows in a radiance of Italian pink. Fairly in the eye of the setting