l he had passed beyond the high-water
mark, he unfurled a small union-jack which he carried in his hand, and,
forcing the butt-end of the staff into the yielding sand, exclaimed:

"In the name of her most gracious majesty Victoria, Queen of Great
Britain and Ireland, I annex this land as a dependency of the British
crown!"

Then they all took off their hats and gave three cheers for the queen;
after which Colonel Lethbridge proposed that the newly-discovered
country be called "Elphinstone Land," a proposition which was carried
with acclamation by a majority of three to one, the dissenting voice
being that of the baronet, who modestly disclaimed the honour of having
the country named after himself.

But _were_ theirs, after all, the first human footprints which had ever
been impressed upon that soil? A decided answer in the negative awaited
them; for they had not advanced very many yards from the shore when they
came upon an object which, upon examination, proved to be an ancient and
much-rusted spear-head broken short off but with some six inches of the
haft still attached to it. The travellers felt, greatly disconcerted at
this discovery; it robbed them at once irretrievably of the honour of
being the first discoverers of the North Pole, and showed them that, at
some unknown period in the remote past, there must have existed a man,
or more probably a body of men, who, not only without the exceptional
facilities offered by the possession of such a ship as the _Flying
Fish_, but with, in all probability, ships infinitely inferior to the
worst of those used by modern explorers, had actually achieved the
hitherto deemed impossible feat of piercing the great ice-barrier and
actually reaching the northern pole of the earth.

Who were they? Of what country could they possibly have been natives?
And why was the fact of their important discovery suffered to sink into
oblivion? Such were the questions which at once rose to the minds of
the baronet and his companions, and to which their lips spontaneously
gave utterance.

"I think there can be little doubt as to who and what they were,"
remarked the professor. "They were _Vikings_; and their leader it must
unquestionably have been who drew the chart found by us in the Viking
ship buried in the ice of the paleocrystic sea. It is his ship which we
see delineated upon the chart; this is the land from which she is
represented as sailing triumphantly away; and it was doubtl