clear of its thick crystal coat. They were what is
called brake-pumps--that is to say, pumps which are worked by handles.
The ice, of course, held them immovable, but they looked to be perfectly
sound, in good working order, though there would be neither chance nor
need to test them until the schooner went afloat.

I cleared the other one and was well satisfied with my morning's work.
But I did bitterly lament the lack of a little crew. Even the Frenchman
as he was yesterday would have served my turn, for between us we might
have made shift to clamber aloft, and with hatchets break the sails
free of their ice bonds, and so expose canvas enough to hold the wind,
which could not have failed to impart a swifter motion to the berg. But
with my single pair of hands I could only look up idly at the yards and
gaffs standing hard as granite. Still, even such surface as the spars
and rigging offered to the breeze helped our progress. We were but a
very little berg, nay, not a berg, but rather a sheet of ice lying
indifferently flat upon the sea, and, as I believe, without much depth.
Our spars and gear were as if the ice itself were rigged as a ship, and
then there was the height of the hull besides to offer to the breeze a
tolerable resistance for its offices of propulsion. In this way I
explain our progress; but whatever the cause, certain it was that our
bed of ice was fairly under weigh, and at noon the island of ice bore at
least half a league distant from us, and we had opened the sea broadly
past its northern cape.

I have often diverted myself with wondering what sort of impression the
posture of our schooner would have made on the minds of sailors sighting
us from their deck. We looked to be floating out of water, and mariners
who regard the devil as a conjuror must have accepted us as one of his
pet inventions.

The many icebergs which encumbered the sea filled me with anxiety. We
were travelling faster than they, and it seemed impossible that we could
miss striking one or another of them. Yet perilous as they were, I could
not but admire their beautiful appearance as they floated upon the dark
blue of the running waters, flashing out very gloriously to the sun with
a sparkling of tints upon their whiteness as if fires of twenty
different colours had been kindled upon their craggy steeps, and then
fading into a sulky watchet to the dull violet shadowing of the passing
clouds. I particularly marked a very brilliant s