able. The chair gave him much anxiety,
however. He evidently feared to fall off or upset it, for, on rising to
reach some food opposite, he had tilted it back, and received a
tremendous though unacknowledged start from the crash that followed.

Half an hour later, Macnab, having left his interpreter in charge of the
establishment, was beating the track on snow-shoes through the forest,
his four wolfish-looking dogs following with a sled-load of provisions
and bedding, and Big Otter bringing up the rear.

The day turned out to be bright calm, and frosty. It was in thorough
unison with Macnab's feelings, for the near prospect of soon meeting
with men somewhat like himself produced a calm and bright condition of
mind which he had not experienced for many a day. It is true that the
frost can scarcely be said to have represented the Highlander's
temperament; but if there be truth in the saying that extremes meet, it
may be admissible to say that intense cold, which had the effect of
expanding water into ice so that it rent the very rocks, might be
appropriately compared with that intense warmth of Macnab's feelings
which had the effect of all but bursting his very bosom! There was not
a breath of air stirring when the two men passed from the forest, and
struck out upon the marble surface of the great lake which lay at the
distance of about two miles from their establishment. The sun was
rising at the time on the horizon of the ocean-like lake, gloriously
bright and cheering, though with no appreciable warmth in its beams.
Diamonds innumerable glittered on the frosted willow-boughs; the snow
under the travellers' tread gave forth that peculiar squeak, or chirping
sound, which is indicative of extreme Arctic frost, and the breath from
their mouths came out like the white puffs of a locomotive, settling on
their breasts in thick hoar-frost, and silvering such of their locks as
straggled out beyond the margin of their caps. There was no life at
first in the quiet scene, but, just as they passed through the last
clump of bushes on the margin of the lake, a battalion of ptarmigan,
seemingly a thousand strong, burst with startling whirr from under their
very feet, and skimmed away like a snow-cloud close to the ground, while
an Arctic fox, aroused from his lair by the noise, slank quietly off
under the false belief that he had not been seen.

The rise of the ptarmigan had another effect, on which the travellers
had not cou