aft on an even keel."

His taunting words aroused us to exertion; and it was proposed to get
the vessel up by driving wedges of ice under her bilge, and since the
cradle could be of no further use, to build a way for her to the water,
or to where the ice might be thin enough to allow us to break it, so as
to form a channel for her to float through.

We laboured away very hard; but our want of scientific knowledge made us
despair of accomplishing the task. The first day we did nothing--the
next we set to work again, but performed little of the proposed work.

"It's of no use, I see," grumbled David. "We may as well make up our
minds to spend the rest of our days here."

While he was speaking, and all hands were standing doing nothing, I
happened to turn my eyes to the northward, and there I saw what appeared
to me a high land, covered with towers, and houses, and church-steeples,
with trees and rocks on either side. Under the land, however, appeared
a thin line of water, and dividing it a broad gap, as it were the mouth
of some wide river or fiord; but what most attracted my attention was an
inverted ship, which appeared above it under all sail.

I at once guessed that this extraordinary appearance was caused by
refraction; but the figure of the ship puzzled me. It was so perfect in
every respect, that I was convinced that it could not be an ocular
illusion, and that there must be some real ship, and that this was her
reflection in the clouds. I pointed her out to my companions; and when
they saw that all the objects were continually changing and that she
remained the same, they were of the same opinion. We therefore resolved
to watch, and to get the boat ready to shove off to her should a ship
appear; at the same time the great uncertainty of what might really be
the case prevented us from feeling any exuberance of joy. It was
already late in the day, but none of us could sleep, so eager were we to
keep a look-out for the strange ship.

Hour after hour passed away, and still no vessel appeared to relieve our
anxiety. Some of the men at length grew weary of watching, and threw
themselves on their beds to sleep.

"It was, after all, to my mind but a fancy," exclaimed Terence, entering
the hut with a discontented air. "The figure we saw in the sky was very
like a ship, I own; but still I'd bet anything it was no ship at all."

Andrew and I still held that it was a ship.

"Come, mates," said David, who had