and you may freeze to death
without waking up."

"Don't stir!" What a command, I thought, to give a tired traveller
whose bones ache from his long snow-shoe tramping in the woods, whose
nerves and muscles are unstrung, and who, like others when thus
fatigued, has even found it helpful to his rest and comfort to turn
occasionally and stretch his limbs!

In this frame of mind, and under this order, which, after all, I felt
must be obeyed for fear of the dire results that might follow, I at
length managed to fall asleep, for I was very weary. After a while I
woke up to a state of semi-consciousness, and found myself tugging and
pulling at what I thought in my dreamy condition was the end of an axe
handle. The vague impression on my mind was, that some careless Indian
had left his axe just behind my head, and in the night the handle had
fallen across my face, and I had now got hold of the end of it.
Fortunately for me, I very quickly after this woke fully up, and then
found out that what I had imagined to be the end of an axe handle was my
own nose; and a badly frozen one it was, and both of my ears were about
in the same condition.

With the guide's last orders in my ears, I think I must have gone to
sleep all right, but I suppose, from the unusual smothering sensation,
unconsciously I must have pushed down the robes from my face, and
uncovered my head and my hand, and then gradually returned to
consciousness with the above results. However, after a few nights of
this severe kind of discipline, I at length became as able to sleep with
my head covered up as an Indian.

When a foot or eighteen inches of snow fell upon us, we rejoiced, for it
added to our comfort, and caused us to sleep the better. Under this
additional covering we generally rested a couple of hours longer than
usual, often to make up for the loss of sleep of the previous nights,
when we had found it impossible, or had considered it dangerous, to go
to sleep.

The hardest work and the most disagreeable is the getting up from such a
bed in such a place. Often, in spite of the intense cold, we are in a
kind of a clammy perspiration, on account of the many wraps and
coverings about us. As we throw off these outer garments, and spring up
in our camp, Jack Frost instantly assails us in a way that makes us
shiver, and often some are almost compelled to cry out in bitter
anguish.

Fortunately the wood is always prepared the night before, and so, as
q