and bedroom. One man, who dubbed himself cook for
the day, with a mate, whose turn it would be to superintend the kitchen
on the morrow, proceeded to cook the dinner. The cooking apparatus was
a boat's stove, eighteen inches long, and nine inches broad, in which
lignum vitae was used as fuel.

Water having first to be made from ice and snow, and then boiled in the
open air, the process was not an expeditious one, and I took my gun and
struck inland; whilst Mr. May, in an opposite direction, made for a
point of land to the westward.

[Headnote: _A WINTER'S EVENING._]

No pen can tell of the unredeemed loneliness of an October evening in
this part of the polar world: the monotonous, rounded outline of the
adjacent hills, as well as the flat, unmeaning valleys, were of one
uniform colour, either deadly white with snow or striped with brown
where too steep for the winter mantle as yet to find a holding ground.
You felt pity for the shivering blade of grass, which, at your feet,
was already drooping under the cold and icy hand that would press it
down to mother earth for nine long months. Talk of "antres vast and
deserts idle,"--talk of the sadness awakened in the wanderer's bosom by
the lone scenes, be it even by the cursed waters of Judea, or afflicted
lands of Assyria,--give me, I say, death in any one of them, with the
good sun and a bright heaven to whisper hope, rather than the solitary
horrors of such scenes as these. The very wind scorned courtesy to such
a repulsive landscape, and as the stones rattled down the slope of a
ravine before the blast, it only recalled dead men's bones, and motion
in a catacomb. A truce, however, to such thoughts--May's merry
recognition breaks the stillness of the frosty air. He has been to the
point, and finds it an island; he says--and I vow he means what he
says--that May Island is a beautiful spot! it has grass and moss upon
it, and traces of game: next year he intends to bag many a hare there.
Sanguine feelings are infectious; I forget my own impressions, adopt
his rosy ones, and we walk back to our tent, guided by the smoke,
plotting plans for shooting excursions in 1851!

"Pemmican is all ready, sir!" reports our Soyer. In troth, appetite
need wait on one, for the greasy compound would pall on moderate taste
or hunger. Tradition said that it was composed of the best rump-steaks
and suet, and cost 1s. 6d. per pound, but we generally voted it
composed of broken-down horses and