y own idea would be to send a class of men to these islands so
thoroughly imbued with their great object and the oil of tobacco that
the great Caucasian chowder of those regions would be followed by such
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and such remorse and
repentance and gastric upheavals that it would be as unsafe to eat a
missionary in the cannibal islands as it is to eat ice-cream in the
United States to-day.

BILL NYE'S ARCTIC-LE.

The excitement consequent upon the anticipated departure of Mr. Gilder
for the north pole has recently awakened in the bosom of the American
people a new interest in what I may term that great terra incognita, if
I may be pardoned for using a phrase from my own mother tongue.

Let us for a moment look back across the bleak waste of years and see
what wonderful progress has been made in the discovery of the pole. We
may then ask ourselves, who will be first to tack his location notice on
the gnawed and season-cracked surface of the pole itself, and what will
he do with it after he has so filed upon it?

Iceland, I presume, was discovered about 860 A. D., or 1,026 years ago,
but the stampede to Iceland has always been under control, and you can
get corner lots in the most desirable cities of Iceland, and wear a long
rickety name with links in it like a rosewood sausage, to-day at a low
price. Naddodr, a Norwegian viking, discovered Iceland A. D. 860, but he
did not live to meet Lieutenant Greely or any of our most celebrated
northern tourists. Why Naddodr yearned to go north and discover a
colder country than his own, why he should seek to wet his feet and get
icicles down his back in order to bring to light more snow-banks and
chilblains, I cannot at this time understand. Why should a robust and
prosperous viking roam around in the cold trying to nose out more
frost-bitten Esquimaux, when he could remain at home and vike?

But I leave this to the thinking mind. Let the thinking mind grapple
with it. It has no charms for me. Moreover, I haven't that kind of a
mind.

Octher, another Norwegian gentleman, sailed around North cape and
crossed the arctic circle in 890 A. D., but he crossed it in the night,
and didn't notice it at the time.

Two or three years later, Erik the Red took a large snow-shovel and
discovered the east coast of Greenland. Erik the Red was a Northman, and
he flourished about the ninth century, and before the war. He sailed
around in that country