ich are placed sixty geographical miles asunder at the centre
or middle of the earth, converge towards the poles, where they all meet in
a point. According to the best observations Roswell Gardiner could obtain,
he was just one of these short degrees of longitude, or two-and-thirty
miles, to the westward of the parallel where he wished to be, when the
wind came from the southward. The change was favourable, as it emboldened
him to run nearer than he otherwise might have felt disposed to do, to the
great barrier of ice which now formed a sort of weather-shore.
Fortunately, the loose bergs and sunken masses had drifted off so far to
the northward, that once within them the schooner had pretty plain
sailing; and Roswell, to lose none of the precious time of the season,
ventured to run, though under very short canvass, the whole of the short
night that succeeded. It is a great assistance to the navigation of those
seas that, during the summer months, there is scarcely any night at all,
giving the adventurer sufficient light by which to thread his way among
the difficulties of his pathless journey.

When the sun reappeared, on the morning of the sixth day after he had left
the Horn, Roswell Gardiner believed himself to be far enough west for his
purposes. It now remained to get a whole degree further to the south,
which was a vast distance in those seas and in that direction, and would
carry him a long way to the southward of the 'Ne Plus Ultra.' If there
was any truth in Daggett, however, that mariner had been there; and the
instructions of the owner rendered it incumbent on our young man to
attempt to follow him. More than once, that morning, did our hero regret
he had not entered into terms with the Vineyard men, that the effort might
have been made in company. There was something so portentous in a lone
vessel's venturing within the ice, in so remote a region, that, to say the
truth, Roswell hesitated. But pride of profession, ambition, love of Mary,
dread of the deacon, native resolution, and the hardihood produced by
experience in dangers often encountered and escaped, nerved him to the
undertaking. It must be attempted, or the voyage would be lost; and our
young mariner now set about his task with a stern determination to achieve
it.

By this time the schooner had luffed up within a cable's length of the
ice, along the margin of which she was running under easy sail. Gardiner
believed himself to be quite as far to the