es thick, and
sheathed and resheathed with "greenheart" to help her in battering the
ice. Inside she is ceiled with English oak and beech, so that her
portholes look like the arrow slits of the windows of an old feudal
castle. Her bow is double-stemmed--shot with a broad band of iron, and
the space of some seventeen feet between the two stems solid with the
choicest hardwoods. Below decks every corner is adapted to some use.
There are bags of flour, hard bread, and food for the crew of three
hundred and twenty men; five hundred tons of coal for the hungry
engine in her battle with the ice-floe. The vessel carries only about
eighteen hundred gallons of water and the men use five hundred in a
day. This, however, is of little consequence, for a party each day
brings back plenty of ice, which is excellent drinking after being
boiled. This ice is of very different qualities. Now it is "slob"
mixed with snow born on the Newfoundland coast. This is called "dirty
ice" by the sealers. Even it at times packs very thick and is hard to
get through. Then there is the clearer, heavy Arctic ice with here and
there huge icebergs frozen in; and again the smoother, whiter variety
known as "whelping ice"--that is, the Arctic shore ice, born probably
in Labrador, on which the seals give birth to their pups.

The masters of watches are also called "scunners"--they go up night
and day in the forebarrel to "scun" the ship--that is, to find the
way or leads through the ice. This word comes from "con" of the
conning tower on a man-of-war.

When the morning of the 10th arrives, all is excitement. Fortunately
this year a southwest wind had blown the ice a mile or so offshore.
Now all the men are on board. The vessels are in the stream. The flags
are up; the whistles are blowing. The hour of two approaches at last,
and a loud cheering, renewed again and again, intimates that the first
vessel is off, and the S.S. Aurora comes up the harbour. Cheers from
the ships, the wharves, and the town answer her whistle, and closely
followed by the S.S. Neptune and S.S. Windsor, she gallantly goes out,
the leader of the sealing fleet for the year.

There have been two or three great disasters at the seal fishery,
where numbers of men astray from their vessels in heavy snow blizzards
on the ice have perished miserably. Sixteen fishermen were once out
hunting for seals on the frozen ice of Trinity Bay when the wind
changed and drove the ice offshore. When nig