ve been connected with the land; for owing to
the old bergs becoming undermined by the waves, they soon turn over, and
so of course send _their_ load to the bottom. An examination of the
sides of the ice-mass also shows to the eye some other peculiarities.
The greater part of the ice is white and thoroughly full of air-bubbles,
which lie in very thin lines parallel to each other; but throughout the
white ice there are numerous slight cracks or streaks, of an intensely
blue and transparent ice, which, on being exposed to heat, before
melting, I've been told by the surgeon of the ship I was in, dissolve
into large angular grains. These blue cracks cross and cross over again
in the mass of the berg, and may possibly be water which has melted and
been frozen again either on the surface of the berg, or in its crevasses
or cracks, when it was a part of the glacier from which it first came.
But, besides the blue ice, in some icebergs may be seen a kind of
conglomerate of ice-blocks of various sizes, the spaces between them
being filled up with snow or crumbled ice. This conglomerate exists
usually in cracks, though it is found also in layers, and even forms
large masses of the larger bergs, mixed up with stones and earthy
lumps."

"Did you ever have any adventure amongst the icebergs?" I asked the old
gentleman at this juncture, thinking I had quite enough of the
scientific aspect of the subject, and dreading lest he might dive
further into the original composition of ice.

"Not in the Arctic Ocean," he replied; "but once, when I was only a
common sailor before the mast and aboard a vessel in the Australian
trade, I came across icebergs in the southern latitudes which were
mighty perilous; and one of these bergs was, by the way, bigger than any
I ever saw in northern seas."

"Tell me all about it," I said, glad to get him on to a regular sea
yarn.

The old gentleman was nothing loth; and I noticed that the moment he
began to speak of his old experiences as a merchant seaman, he dropped
the somewhat affected phraseology in which he had previously been
expounding his theories for my information concerning the polar regions
and the formation of icebergs--thenceforth speaking much more naturally
in the ordinary vernacular of Jack tars.

"I suppose it's forty years ago, more or less," he began, "since I
shipped in the brig _Jane_, John Jiggins master, bound from London to
Melbourne with an assorted cargo.

"She was a de