second the boat was dragged down,
down, down. An immense wave had caught us, rolled us so far over that
our dory in davits had filled with water to the brim. As the ship
righted herself, the weight of the dory snapped off the davit at the
deck, and the boat, still attached by her painter, was dragged
underneath our hull, and threatened to pull us down with it. In two
seconds the men had cut her away, but not before she had nearly banged
herself to matchwood against our side.

Now we are lying under the lea of St. Augustine Island waiting for the
wind to abate. The chief engineer has just offered to row me ashore to
hunt for young puffins. More later.

[Illustration: A PUFFIN GHETTO]

There were hundreds of them in every family, and so many families that
it resembled nothing so much as a puffin ghetto. I judged from the
turmoil that they were screeching for "a place in the sun." The noise
they made did not in the least accord with their respectable Quaker
appearance. Shall I bring you one as a pet? Its austere presence would
help you to remember your "latter end."

When I wrote you that there was ice about, I did not refer to the
field ice through which we travelled on my way north. This is the real
thing this time--icebergs, and lots of them. They call the little ones
"growlers," and big and little alike are classed as "pieces of ice"!
They are not my idea of a "piece" of anything. I know now what the
Ancient Mariner meant when he said:

"And ice mast high came floating by
As green as emerald."

It exactly describes them, only it doesn't wholly describe them, for
no one could. They loom up in every shape and size and variation of
form, pinnacles and towers and battlements, stately palaces of
glittering crystal, triumphal archways more gorgeous than ever
welcomed a conqueror home. Sometimes they are shining white, too
dazzling to look at; and sometimes they are streaked with great vivid
bands of green and azure which are so unearthly and brilliant that I
feel certain some fairy has dipped his brush in the solar spectrum and
dabbed the colours on this gigantic palette.

A sea without these jewels of the Arctic will forever look barren and
unfinished to me after this. Even the sailors, who know too well what
a menace they are to their craft, yield to their beauty a mute and
grudging homage. To sit in the sun or the moonlight, and watch a heavy
sea hurling mountains of water and foam over one of these oc