him had a skim of ice nearly an inch in
thickness. This caused him great uneasiness; and he waited with the
greatest anxiety for the return of light, in order to observe the
condition of Daggett.

Sure enough, when the day came out distinctly, it was seen that ice of
sufficient thickness to bear men on it, covered the entire surface within
the crescent. Daggett and his people were already at work on it, using the
saw. They must have taken the alarm before the return of day, for the
schooner was not only free from the ground, but had been brought fully a
cable's length without the cove. Gardiner watched the movements of Daggett
and his crew with a glass for a short time, when he ordered all hands
called. The cook was already in the galley, and a warm breakfast was soon
prepared. After eating this, the two whale-boats were lowered, and Roswell
and Hazard both rowed as far as the ice would permit them, when they
walked the rest of the way to the imprisoned craft, taking with them most
of their hands, together with the saw.

It was perhaps fortunate for Daggett that it soon began to blow fresh from
the northward, sending into the bay a considerable sea, which soon broke
up the ice, and enabled the Vineyard craft to force her way through the
fragments, and join her consort about noon.

Glad enough was Roswell to regain his own vessel; and he made sail on a
wind, determined to beat out of the narrow waters at every hazard, the
experience of that night having told him that they had remained in the
cove too long. Daggett followed willingly, but not like a man who had
escaped by the skin of his teeth, from wintering near the antarctic circle.

Chapter XXII.

"Beside the Moldau's rushing stream,
With the wan moon overhead,
There stood, as in an awful dream,
The army of the dead."

Longfellow.

Most of our readers will understand what was meant by Mary Pratt's
"inclination of the earth's axis to the plane of its orbit;" but as there
may be a few who do not, and as the consequences of this great physical
fact are materially connected with the succeeding events of the narrative,
we propose to give such a homely explanation of the phenomenon as we
humbly trust will render it clear to the most clouded mind. The orbit of
the earth is the path which it follows in space in its annual revolution
around the sun. To a planet there is no up or down, except as ascent and
descent are estimated from and towards it