pes, then get ashore," said Peter,
confidently.

La Salle drew out his watch.

"It was high tide at four o'clock, and it is now nearly seven. Peter,
just climb to the top of the berg, and see how we drift."

Peter dropped his half-picked bird, ascended with eager agility, lined
another projection of the floe with some object on the New Brunswick
shore, seemed puzzled, looked more carefully, and then slowly descended,
apparently sad and disheartened.

"Well, Peter, how is it?" said La Salle, cheerfully.

"No good; ice lun north-west, against tide; no get ashore to-day," was
the reluctant answer.

Regnar seemed little surprised, but Waring turned almost white with
anxiety and disappointment.

"I thought as much," said La Salle, quietly. "With such a gale as this,
the tide, whose rise and fall does not average four feet on this coast,
often seems to run in one direction, and even to remain at flood for a
day or two; but even if it did fall, this floe carries sail enough with
this wind to make from two to three miles an hour against it. We shall
probably have easterly and southerly winds until to-morrow, and must now
be well up to Cape Bauld, and about mid-channel, say twelve miles from
shore."

"Why not try land, then, with the boat? We four could surely make twelve
mile in the course of the day," asked Regnar, somewhat impatiently for
him.

"How deep is the snow and slush now, Regnie?" asked the leader of the
little party, calmly.

"'Bout knee-deep on level ice," said the boy.

"Come up here, all of you," said La Salle, ascending the lookout.

The three followed, and found themselves scarcely able to stand at
times, when a fiercer blast than usual swept up the strait, howling
through the tortuous and intricate ravines and valleys of the
ice-fields.

"Can we cross such a place as that?" asked La Salle, pointing to where
an edge of a large ice-field, suddenly lifted by the wedge-like brink of
another, began a majestic and resistless encroachment, with the
incalculable power communicated by the vast weight pressing behind it.

A body of ice, at least a yard in thickness, ran up a steep ascent of
five or six feet, broke with its own weight, pressed on again up the
steeper incline, broke again, and so continued to ascend and break off
until a ridge a score of feet high, crested with glittering fragments of
broken ice, interrupted the passage between the two floes.

Regnar was silent, and then said, resolute