is life. Such might have been, probably _was_, the case,
until the seeming return of what had once been deemed good luck awakened
old desires, and brought out traits of character that were about to be
lost in the near views of a future world. All this Roswell saw and noted,
and the reflections produced by his own perilous condition, the certain
loss of so many companions, the probable death of Daggett, and the humble
but impressive example and sympathy of Stimson, were such as would have
delighted the tender spirit of Mary Pratt, could she have known of their
existence.

But the great consideration of the moment, the centre of all the hopes and
fears of our sealers, was the rebuilding of the mutilated Sea Lion.
Although the long thaw did so much for them, the reader is not to regard
it as such a spell of warm weather as one enjoys in May within the
temperate zone. There were no flowers, no signs of vegetation, and
whenever the wind ceased to blow smartly from the northward, there was
frost. At two or three intervals cold snaps set in that looked seriously
like a return to winter, and, at the end of the third week of pleasant
weather mentioned, it began to blow a gale from the southward, to snow,
and to freeze. The storm commenced about ten in the forenoon; ere the sun
went down, the days then being of great length, every passage around the
dwelling was already blocked up with banks of snow. Several times had the
men asked permission to remove the sails from the house, to admit air and
light; but it was now found that the tent-like verandah they formed was of
as much use as it had been at any time during the season. Without it,
indeed, it would not have been possible for the people to quit their
dwelling during three entire days. Everything like work was, of course,
suspended during this tempest, which seriously menaced the unfortunate
sealers with the necessity of again breaking up their schooner, now nearly
completed, with a view again to keep themselves from freezing. The weather
was not so intensely cold as it had been, continuously, for months during
the past winter; but, coming as it did, after so long a spell of what
might be considered as a balmy atmosphere in that region, it found the
people unbraced and little prepared for it. At no time was the thermometer
lower than twenty degrees below zero; this was near morning, after a sharp
and stinging night; nor was it for any succession of hours much below
zero. But ze