ead,
and she did not rise. The bottom came no nearer, and the Dipsey moved
cautiously on. Nobody thought of eating; they did not talk much, but at
every one of the outlooks there were eager faces.

At last they saw nothing above them but floating fragments of ice. Still
they kept on, until they were plainly moving below the surface of open
water. Then Mr. Gibbs looked at Sammy.

"I think it is time to rise," said he; and Sammy passed the word that
the Dipsey was going up into the upper air.

When the little craft, so long submerged in the quiet depths of the
Arctic Sea, had risen until she rested on the surface of the water,
there was no general desire, as there had been when she emerged into
Lake Shiver, to rush upon the upper deck. Instead of that, the occupants
gathered together and looked at each other in a hesitating way, as if
they were afraid to go out and see whether they were really in an open
sea, or lying in some small ice-locked body of water.

Mr. Gibbs was very pale.

"My friends," said he, "we are going on deck to find out whether or not
we have reached the open polar sea, but we must not be excited, and we
must not jump to hurried conclusions; we may have found what we are in
search of, and we may not have found it yet. But we will go up and
look out upon the polar world as far as we can see it, and we shall
not decide upon this thing or that until we have thoroughly studied the
whole situation. The engines are stopped, and every one may go up, but
I advise you all to put on your warmest clothes. We should remember our
experience at Lake Shiver."

"It wouldn't be a bad idea," said Sammy Block, "to throw out a lot of
tarpaulins to stand on, so that none of us will get frozen to the wet
deck, as happened before."

When the hatch was opened a man with a black beard pushed himself
forward towards the companionway.

"Keep back here, sir," said Mr. Marcy, clapping his hand upon the man's
shoulder.

"I want to be ready to spread the tarpaulins, sir," said he, with a
wriggling motion, as if he would free himself.

"You want to be the first to see the polar sea, that is my opinion,"
said Mr. Marcy; "but you keep back there where you belong." And with
that he gave the eager Rovinski a staggering push to the rear.

Five minutes afterwards Margaret Raleigh and Roland Clewe, sitting close
together by the telegraph instrument in the Works at Sardis, received
the following message:

"We have risen to th