e delay. Leo was
therefore obliged to creep out of his hut, wondering intensely, and not
a little uncomfortably, as to what having his nose made blue could mean.

He was quickly enlightened by Anders, who told him that the most
successful harpooner in a whale hunt is looked on as a very great
personage indeed, and is invariably decorated with what may be styled
the Eskimo order of the Blue Ribbon.

Scarcely had he received this information, when he was seized by the
young men and hurried into the midst of an expectant circle, where he
submitted with a good grace to the ceremony. A youth advanced to him,
made a few complimentary remarks, seized him by the right ear, and, with
a little wet paint, drew a broad blue line across his face over the
bridge of his nose. He was then informed that he had received the
highest honour known to the Eskimos of the far north, and that, among
other privileges, it gave him the right of marrying two wives if he felt
disposed to do so! Accepting the honour, but declining the privilege,
Leo expressed his gratitude for the compliment just paid him in a neat
Eskimo speech, and then retired to his hut in search of much-needed
repose, not a little comforted by the thought that the chief's broken
arm would probably postpone the threatened war for an indefinite period.

That night ridiculous fancies played about his deerskin pillow, for he
dreamed of being swallowed by a mad whale, and whisked up to the sky by
a kite with a broken arm and a blue stripe across its nose!

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

TELLS OF A WARLIKE EXPEDITION AND ITS HAPPY TERMINATION.

While these stirring events were taking place in Flatland, our friends
in the Island of Poloe continued to fish and hunt, and keep watch and
ward against their expected enemies in the usual fashion; but alas for
the poor Englishmen! All the light had gone out of their eyes; all the
elasticity had vanished from their spirits. Ah! it is only those who
know what it is to lose a dear friend or brother, who can understand the
terrible blank which had descended on the lives of our discoverers,
rendering them, for the time at least, comparatively indifferent to the
events that went on around them, and totally regardless of the great
object which had carried them so far into those regions of ice.

They could no longer doubt that Leo and his companions had perished, for
they had searched every island of the Poloe group, including that one on
whic