bite; she is not a fierce creature, and her throat is so small that sailors say that a penny loaf would choke her. But sailors

are not very particular as to facts when they "spin a yarn," which means tell a tale."

A whale does not always, when wounded, show signs of anger; she tries to make an escape from the danger which threatens her. But her effort to save herself imperils the whalers. When she is harpooned, she darts away so speedily that the long thick ropes to which the harpoons are fastened, would by their rapid friction against the head of the boat, set it on fire if water were not poured on it. Sometimes the whalers get themselves entangled in the rope or line as it flies out, and have their limbs torn off, or are dragged overboard and drowned.

Again, the whalers' ship may be broken as well as their boats. She may be crushed by icebergs. Icebergs are enormous mountains of solid ice.

The ice is not frozen sea-water. Icebergs are formed on the coast by the snow on the land melting, and then suddenly freezing again. Imagine a number of great mountains floating in the ocean, and then you will have but a faint idea of what icebergs are. Their weight is enormous, and sometimes they float so rapidly that the ships cannot be got out of their way.

A modern traveller concludes his descrip

tion of an iceberg, which he says must have been two or three miles in circumference, by saying, "No pencil has ever yet given anything like the true effect of an iceberg.” In a picture they are huge uncouth masses stuck in the sea; while their chief beauty and grandeur, their slow stately motion, the whirling of the snow about their summits, and the fearful groaning and crackling of their parts no picture can give.

Ice-fields differ from icebergs in being flat. Though they are called fields, they are not like the bergs, land-formations, they are sheets of ice formed on the ocean. Some are very thick, and have what would in a land-field be called hillocks on them, but they are called hummocks. When the

whole of an ice-field can be seen from the mast-head of a ship, it is called a floe. A stream of ice is composed of several sheets of ice, large or small, which join and stretch out in one direction. Ships are sometimes crushed between ice-fields.

The walrus makes breathing holes in a floe or ice-field, and sports about between the drifts of ice. The pieces of open water which the walrus makes by breaking through the ice are called walrus holes. The walrus is attacked whenever those who see him can attack him, but he is never attacked without great danger, for when wounded he is as fierce as any animal hunted by man.

The Polar regions have their peculiar sea-dangers, but more lives are lost at sea within the temperate zones than elsewhere.

"Earth-her valleys and her mountains,

Mortal man's behests obey;

The unfathomable fountains

Scoff his search and scorn his sway."

Many a goodly ship has been dashed to pieces against rocks from which all the efforts of their crews to save them were vain. Many a goodly ship has split on rocks on which they were driven by the raging tempest. In such cases many a