bout the study of
meteorology, had a rare haul on this occasion!

The observation he now obtained only confirmed the skipper's previous
impression that we were on Herschel Island, one of the Hermite, or Cape
Horn group, the mountainous peaks of which are mainly composed of green
stone, in which hornblende and feldspar are more or less conspicuous,
and the presence of iron very apparent, some of the rocks being
intensely magnetic, causing the needle of a little pocket compass I had
to execute all sorts of strange freaks.

When the weather got fine, we took a walk round the island as far as the
ridge that bisected it would allow, finding the elevated ground clothed
with thickly growing trees, principally a species of spruce fir called
the antarctic beech, which runs to a height of some thirty or forty
feet, with a girth of five or six feet. It is a magnificent evergreen,
and would look well on an English lawn, for it has a splendid spreading
head.

Beside this beech, there was a pretty little laurel tree, and the
arbutus, which one of the sailors, who was from Devonshire, would
persist in calling a myrtle bush, although the skipper showed him the
berries to convince him to the contrary. There was also a sort of wild
strawberry plant plentiful enough about, running like a vine over the
rocks under the cliff; but there was nothing like what we call grass to
be seen anywhere, only clumps or tussocks of a fibrous material like
hemp, with long, ragged, straggling ends.

So much for the botany of the island; as for the living creatures,
"barring ourselves," as Pat Doolan would have expressed it, there were
"race horses," "steamer" ducks, and penguins, besides a species of wild
goose that we had seen off the Falkland Islands, and which Sails
described to me as being so tough that a shipmate of his, who was once
trying to gnaw through the drumstick of one when in Stanley Harbour, had
his eye knocked out by the bone "fetching back" sharply through the
elasticity of the tendon which his teeth missed hold of--a tough morsel
to chew away at, if the yarn be true, eh?

But, amongst all these specimens of animated nature, we did not see a
trace of any of the natives--a fact which I took care to point out to
the skipper, expressing my belief that he had only been romancing about
the "cannibals," as he termed them.

He, however, denied this.

"No, my lad," he said. "The natives of this coast are a small,
barbarous race of bein