to the ship's gear. The deck was slippery and cold,
everything, except the funnel, was sticky and cold, and the fog-horn
made day and night hideous with noises like some unmusical giant trying
in vain to hit the note Fa. The density of the fog varied. Sometimes we
could not see each other a few feet off, at others we could see pretty
well what we were about on the vessel, but could see nothing beyond.

We went very slowly, and the fog lasted unusually long. It included a
Sunday, which is a blessed day to Jack at sea. No tarring, greasing,
oiling, painting, scraping or scrubbing but what is positively
necessary, and no yarn-spinning but that of telling travellers' tales,
which seamen aptly describe as spinning yarns. I heard a great many that
day which recalled the school-master's stories, and filled my head and
heart with indefinable longings and impatience. More and more did it
seem impossible that one could live content in one little corner of this
interesting world when one has eyes to see and ears to hear, and hands
for work, and legs to run away with.

Not that the tales that were told on this occasion were of an
encouraging nature, for they were all about fogs and ice; but they were
very interesting. One man had made this very voyage in a ship that got
out of her course as it might be where we were then. She was too far to
the north'ard when a fog came on, as it might be the very fog we were in
at that moment, and it lasted, lifting a bit and falling again worse
than ever, just the very same as it was a-doing now. Cold? He believed
you this fog was cold, and you might believe him that fog was cold, but
the cold of both together would not be a patch upon what it was when
your bones chattered in your skin and you heard the ship's keel
grinding, and said "Ice!" "He'd seen some queer faces--dead and
living--in his time, but when _that_ fog lifted and the sun shone upon
walls of green ice on both sides above our head, and the captain's face
as cold and as green as them with knowing all was up--"

At this point the narrator was called away, and somebody asked,

"Has any one heard him tell how it ended?"

"I did," said Pat Shaughnessy, "and it spoilt me dinner that time."

"Go on, Pat! What happened to them?"

"The lowest depths of misfortune. Sorra a soul but himself and a boy
escaped by climbing to a ledge on the topmost peak of one of the
icebergs just in the nick of time to see the ship cracked like a walnut