hed
overboard by some passing ship, or like a gigantic lump of foam tossed
on the crest of a wave. If the day is sunless, the reflection of light
which gives it that glistening appearance, so remarkable as the midnight
sun glances among an array of these objects, is wanting to add dignity
to the contour of what it is a rude dissipation of life's young dream to
learn is an iceberg--though on a very small scale. It is simply a wave-
worn straggler from the fleet which will soon be met sailing southward
out of the Greenland fjords. The warm waters of the Atlantic will in
the course of a few days be too much for it. The sun will be at work on
it; it will get undermined by the wash of the breakers, until, being
top-heavy, it will speedily capsize. Then the war between the ice and
the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will
become the `bergy bit,' as whalers call the slowly-lessening mass of
crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but
only to rise again in the form of vapour, which the cold of the north
will convert into snow, the parent of that inland ice about the polar
regions which forms the source of subsequent icebergs afresh--the
process being always going on, never ending!"

"Why, you are quite a philosopher," I observed.

"A bit of a one, sir," said the old gentleman with a smile. "Those who
go down to the sea in ships, you know, see wonders in the deep! But, to
continue what I was telling you about the icebergs. As your ship
proceeds further north they become more numerous and of larger
dimensions, until, as you pass the entrance of some of those great
fjords, or inlets, which intersect the Greenland coast-line, they pour
out in such numbers that the wary mariner is thankful for the continuous
daylight and summer seas that enable him so easily to avoid these
floating rocks. Here are several broken-up ones floating about in the
Waigat, a narrow strait between the island of Disco and the mainland of
Greenland, and in close vicinity to several fjords noted for sending big
bergs adrift in the channel way to float southward. These are the `ice-
mountains' of the fancy artist. One ashore close into the land, and yet
not stranded or on account of its depth in the water getting into any
very shallow soundings, you may see in your mind's eye, as I've seen
them scores of times in reality. It presents to your notice a dull
white mass of untransparent ice--not