about 6.45 P.M.
last evening, we came through by about 9 P.M., and sat up talking and
hearing all the splendid news till past 2 A.M. this morning.

All the Northern Party look very fat and fit, and they are most cheerful
about the time they have had, and make light of all the anxious days they
must have spent and their hard times.

I cannot write all their story. When the ship was battling with the pack
to try and get in to them they had open water in Terra Nova Bay to the
horizon, as seen from 200 feet high. They prepared for the winter,
digging their hut into a big snowdrift a mile from where they were
landed. They thought that the ship had been wrecked--or that every one
had been taken off from here, and that then the ship had been blown north
by a succession of furious gales which they had and could not get back.
They never considered seriously the possibility of sledging down the
coast before the winter. They got settled in and were very warm--so warm
that in August they did away with one door, of which they had three, of
biscuit boxes and sacking.

Their stove was the bottom of an oil tin, and they cooked by dripping
blubber on to seal bones, which became soaked with the blubber, and
Campbell tells me they cooked almost as quickly as a primus. Of course
they were filthy. Their main difficulty was dysentery and ptomaine
poisoning.

Their stories of the winter are most amusing--of "Placing the Plug, or
Sports in the Antarctic"; of lectures; of how dirty they were; of their
books, of which they had four, including David Copperfield. They had a
spare tent, which was lucky, for the bamboos of one of theirs were blown
in during a big wind, and the men inside it crept along the piedmont on
hands and knees to the igloo and slept two in a bag. How the seal seemed
as if they would give out, and they were on half rations and very hungry:
and they were thinking they would have to come down in the winter, when
they got two seals: of the fish they got from the stomach of a seal--"the
best feed they had"--the blubber they have eaten.

But they were buried deep in the snow and quite warm. Big winds all the
time from the W.S.W., cold winds off the plateau--in the igloo they could
hear almost nothing outside--how they just had a biscuit a day at times,
sugar on Sundays, etc.

And so all is well in this direction, and we have done right in going
south, and we have at least succeeded in getting all records. I suppose
any news