THE CELESTIAL COUNTRY.

OW do we spend the day when it is not term-day, or rather the
twenty-four hours? for it is
twilight mixture of both.
hours?

either all day here, or all night, or a
How do we spend the twenty-four

At six in the morning, McGary is called, with all hands who have slept in. The decks are cleaned, the ice-hole opened, the refreshing beef-nets examined, the ice-tables measured, and things aboard put to rights. At half-past seven, all hands rise, wash on deck, open the doors for ventilation, and come below for breakfast. We are short of fuel, and therefore cook in the cabin. Our breakfast, for all fare alike, is hard tack, pork, stewed apples frozen like molasses-candy, tea and coffee, with a delicate portion of raw potato. After breakfast, the smokers take their pipe till nine: then all hands turn to, idlers to idle, and workers to work; Ohlsen to his bench; Brooks to his "preparations" in canvass; McGary

ARCTIC LIFE.

to play tailor; Whipple to make shoes; Bonsall to tinker; Baker to skin birds, and the rest to the "office!" Take a look into the Arctic Bureau! One table, one salt-pork lamp with rusty chlorinated flame, three stools, and as many waxen-faced men with their legs drawn up under them, the deck at zero being too cold for the feet. Each has his department: Kane is writing, sketching, and projecting maps; Hayes copying logs and meteorologicals; Sontag reducing his work at Fern Rock. A fourth, as one of the working members of the hive, has long been defunct: you will find him in bed, or studying "Littell's Living Age." At twelve, a business round of inspection, and orders enough to fill up the day with work. Next, the drill of the Esquimaux dogs, my own peculiar recreation,- a dog-trot, especially refreshing to legs that creak with every kick, and rheumatic shoulders that chronicle every descent of the whip. And so we get on to dinner-time; the occasion of another gathering, which misses the tea and coffee of breakfast, but rejoices in pickled cabbage and dried peaches instead.

At dinner as at breakfast the raw potato comes in, our hygienic luxury. Like doctor stuff generally, it is not as appetizing as desirable. Grating it down nicely, leaving out the ugly red spots liberally, and adding the utmost oil as a lubricant, it is as much as I can do to persuade the mess to shut their eyes and bolt it, like Mrs. Squeers' molasses and brimstone at Dotheboys' Hall. Two absolutely refuse to taste it. I tell them of the Silesians using its leaves as a spinach, of the whalers in the South Seas getting drunk on the molasses which had preserved the large potatoes of the Azores, I point to this gum, so fungoid and angry the day before yesterday, and so flat and amiable to-day,-all by a potato poultice: my eloquence is wasted: they persevered in rejecting the admirable compound.

Sleep, exercise, amusement, and work at will, carry on the day till our six o'clock supper, a meal something like breakfast, and something like dinner, only a little more scant, and the officers come in with the reports of the day. Doctor Hayes shows me the log, I sign it; Sontag the weather, I sign the weather; Mr. Bonsall the tides and thermometers. Thereupon comes in mine ancient, Brooks; and I enter in his journal No. 3 all the work done under his charge, and discuss his labors for the morrow.

McGary comes next, with the cleaning-up arrangements, inside, outside, and on decks; and Mr. Wilson follows with ice measurements. And last of all comes my own record of the day gone by; every line, as I look back upon its pages, giving evidence of a weakened body and harassed mind. We have cards sometimes, and chess sometimes,-and a few magazines, Mr. Littell's thoughtful present, to cheer away the evening.