angle.

No answer.

He would try again. "Any one in here?" There might be a fitful wail
from a far corner. Then the Doctor would have to clamber over and
round the casks and throw aside potato sacks and boxes. Sometimes his
patients, in a sodden stupor, hidden away at the bottom of
everything, could not be found at all.

In these filthy, reeking holds, enduring all discomforts for the sake
of perhaps a hundred dollars payable weeks hence, the men somehow
recovered from their ailments and throve and grew fat on pork and seal
meat, fried with onions. Whenever the rats were especially noisy, the
wise ones said it meant a gale: but sometimes the rats and the wise
men were wrong. It was no place for a man with a weak stomach, that
gallant little sealing-steamer!

On Sunday the men religiously refused to go out on the ice, though the
seals tantalizingly frolicked all about them. The seals seemed to know
how the pious Newfoundlander observes the Lord's Day. The animals
stared at the ship and the ship stared back at them. Then in great
glee the seals took to their perpetual water-sports, in which they are
as adept as the penguins of the Antarctic.

"I have marveled greatly," Grenfell says, "how it is possible for any
hot-blooded creature to enjoy so immensely this terribly cold water as
do these old seals. They paddle about, throw themselves on their
backs, float and puff out their breasts, flapping their flippers like
paws over their chests."

While they lay off Fogo Island, watching the seals, the great pans of
ice, rising and falling with the heaving of the sea, beat on the stout
sides of the _Neptune_ as on a drum-head. Sometimes to avoid an awful
drubbing the _Neptune_ would steam a little ahead, very much as a
swimmer dives into a breaker to cleave it before it combs over and
carries him off his feet. Grenfell himself, loving a bout with "the
bright eyes of danger," left the ship and went out on the ice and
tried to climb one of the bergs, stranded in the midst of the
ice-pack. It was like a living thing striving to fight its way
out--something like a polar bear surrounded by "husky" dogs worrying
him and trying to pull him down.

As a sky-scraper gives to the wind, the berg was rocked to and
fro--eight feet or so with every wave that struck it. It fell on the
pans like a great trip-hammer, backed away and came on again, the ice
groaning as though it were a living creature in mortal agony. As
pieces fell off in