antly of these things; but
most often of the weather. One ship may be pursuing her way under a calm
sky and in smooth waters, while two hundred miles away a neighbour may
be in the middle of a storm; and so the ships talk to one another of
the weather, and combine their forces against it, and, by altering
course a little, or rushing ahead, or hanging back, cheat and dodge
those malignant forces which are ever pursuing them.

But in these April days there was nothing much to be said about the
weather. The winds and the storms were quiet here; they were busy
perhaps up in Labrador or furiously raging about Cape Horn, but they had
deserted for the time the North Atlantic, and all the ships ploughed
steadily on in sunshine and smooth seas. Here and there, however, a
whisper came to Phillips or Bride about something which, though not
exactly weather, was as deeply interesting to the journeying ships--ice.
Just a whisper, nothing more, listened to up there in the sunny Marconi
room, recorded, dealt with, and forgotten. "I have just come through
bad field-ice," whispers one ship; "April ice very far south," says
another; and Phillips taps out his "O.K., O.M.," which is a kind of
cockney Marconi for "All right, old man." And many other messages come
and go, of money and cargoes, and crops and the making of laws; but just
now and then a pin-prick of reminder between all these other topics
comes the word--ICE.

April ice and April weed are two of the most lovely products of the
North Atlantic, but they are strangely opposite in their bearings on
human destiny. The lovely golden April weed that is gathered all round
the west coast of Ireland, and is burnt for indigo, keeps a whole
peasant population in food and clothing for the rest of the year; the
April ice, which comes drifting down on the Arctic current from the
glacier slopes of Labrador or the plateau of North Greenland, keeps the
seafaring population of the North Atlantic in doubt and anxiety
throughout the spring and summer. Lovely indeed are some of these
icebergs that glitter in the sun like fairy islands or the pinnacles of
Valhalla; and dreamy and gentle is their drifting movement as they come
down on the current by Newfoundland and round Cape Race, where, meeting
the east-going Gulf Stream, they are gradually melted and lost in the
waters of the Atlantic. Northward in the drift are often field-ice and
vast floes; the great detached bergs sail farther south into the