CHAPTER XIII.

Changing the Diet again.Changing the Diet again.

“Hiding ourselves away among the rocks, we waited until a flock of the birds flew over us. They flew very low,—not more than five feet above our heads. When they were least expecting it, I threw up the net, and three of them flew bang into it. They were so much stunned by the blow, that only one of them could flutter out before I had drawn in the net; and the Dean was quick enough to seize the remaining two before they could escape. This, being the first experiment, gave us great encouragement, as it was more successful than we had ventured to hope. We went on with the work, without pausing, for several hours, looking upon it as great sport, as indeed it was; and since it was the first thing we had done on the island that seemed like sport, the day was always remembered by us with delight.

“So now you see we had begun to mingle a little pleasure with our life; and this was a very important matter, for you know the old saying, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’”

CHAPTER XIII.The Ancient Mariner takes the Little People on a Little Voyage; and the Little People become convinced that an Arctic Winter, an Aurora Borealis, and an Ancient Mariner, are very Wonderful Things.

A lively breeze was blowing over the little village of Rockdale, and in a lively way the tall trees were bending down their heads, and swinging to and fro as if they liked it; for the leaves were beating time, and were singing joyously, and appeared to be saying all the while how glad they would be to keep beating time and singing on forever, if the wind would only please to be so good as to help them on in the joyous business; and the tall grass and grain were shining in the sun, and rolling round in a very reckless manner, as if they meant to show off their great billows of green and gold, and make the staid and sober little waves that were ruffling up the surface of the bright blue waters of the bay quite ashamed.

“Ha, ha!” laughed our ancient friend, the Captain, when he saw what a day it was. “Ha, ha! what a day indeed!” and right away he began to call loudly for his boy, Main Brace,—

“Main Brace, Main Brace, come here! Come, bear a hand, and be lively there, you plum-duff, chuckle-headed young landlubber, and waddle along aft here on your sausage legs.”

A feeble voice is heard to answer from the galley,—“Ay, ay, sir; comin’, sir, comin’”; and the plum-duff head and the sausage legs follow feebly in after the voice, looking surprised.

“Main Brace,”—begins the Captain.

“Ay, ay, sir,” responds Main Brace; and the plum-duff head lets fall its lower jaw, and looks amazed, the Captain is so much in earnest.

“Some bait, Main Brace! Do you hear, my lad? Be lively, boy, and get some bait; and then overhaul theAlice, and stand by to be ready when I come down. We’ll go a-fishing to-day,—do you hear, my boy? And we’ll have a jolly time,—do you hear that? So be lively now, and be off with your plum-duff head and your sausage legs. I tell you, away, away! for we’ll go a-sailin’. Away, away! for we’ll go a-sailin’, a-sailin’, a-sailin’. Away, away! for we’ll go a-sailin’,—a-sailin’ on the sea.”

Without another word the sausage legs made off with the plum-duff head, which had no sooner got outside the door than it began to let out in dislocated fragments, from a mouth that gradually expanded until it reached from ear to ear, “Away, away! we’ll go a-fishin’, a-fishin’, a-fishin’; away, away! we’ll go a-sailin’, a-sailin’, a-sailin’; away, away! we’ll all be jolly, jolly, jolly,—we’ll all be jolly”; and so on until the sausage legs had carried the plum-duff head and the refrain together so far down among the trees, towards the water, that all the other “jollys” and the sailin’s and the “fishin’s,” and the rest of it, were blown clean away by the wind.

And off went the Captain, too, hurrying up to the top of the hill behind the cottage, as if the cosey little thing was all afire, and the dear old soul was running up for help; and when he reached the top of the hill, he began swinging round his old tarpaulin hat, making the long blue ribbons fairly whistle and speak, as if they would say, “Old man, old man, stop a bit, and take breath!—can’t you now? and say, what’s this all about, for goodness’ sake!”

The Ancient Mariner becomes excited, and Main Brace makes an effort.The Ancient Mariner becomes excited, and Main Brace makes an effort.

But the old man knew well enough himself what it was all about; for he was signalling his little friends; and every circle of his big arm, and every shake of his long gray beard, and every swing of his old tarpaulin hat, seemed to sing out, “Hurrah, hurrah, for a jolly day! hurrah, hurrah, my children gay! hurrah, hurrah, let’s up and away, upon the bright blue waters!”

By and by the children caught sight of the old tarpaulin hat and the blue ribbons and the Captain himself, all in this state of violent excitement; and down they bore at once upon the ancient mariner, as if he were a regular bluff-bowed old East Indiaman, full of golden ingots, and they were clipper-built, copper-fastened, rakish fore-and-afters of the piratical pattern.

“Heyday!” (the old man never thought he had begun until he had thrown off a heyday or so), “heyday, my hearties!” said the ancient mariner, as the children came up to him,—“heyday, my dears! keep on that same course before the wind, and you’ll fetch up in the right port”; and so, without further ado, he hurried “my hearties” down to the beach, and aboard the yacht; and then very soon Main Brace (whose mouth had never left off expanding at the prospect of “a fishin’” and “a sailin’” and “a jolly day” generally) had the anchor away; and then the Captain spread the white sails to the lively breeze; and there never was, since the world began, a merrier little party, in a merrier little craft, afloat upon blue water on a merrier day. Indeed, the day was so merry, and the craft was so merry, and the waves were so merry as they came leaping round the yacht, and the wind was so merry as it bulged out the sail and went whistling through the rigging, and the little party in the yacht were so merry, and everything and everybody was so merry, that it would be strange indeed if the fish were not merry too; and the finny creatures played round the pretty hooks, too merry by half to touch them; and then they came merrily up, and poked their heads out close to the top of the water, and stared at the merry-makers in the yacht, and they seemed to be whispering to one another, “O, what a jolly lot of coves they are, to be sure! O, don’t theywish they may catch us?—don’t they though?” and then they dropped down again to look at the pretty hooks; but only the sober-sided ones that had no idea of being merry went near enough to bite, and these were surely bitten in return; for, if the hook once got into their red gills, they found themselves jerked up before they could say Lobster, and heard merry voices shouting round them, to their great astonishment.

And of these sober-sided fishes who were so unfortunate as to have no idea of being merry, the Captain and his little friends caught as many as they wanted; and then the Captain said to his little friends, “Put away your fishing-tackle now, and come down below into the little cabin, and I’ll surprise you.” And, sure enough, he did surprise them,—quite as much, perhaps, as if some fairy queen had come, and called them to a fairy banquet; as much indeed, perhaps, as if they had themselves suddenly been turned to fairies, and were doing something that was never even dreamed of by mortal child before; for, while they had been fishing, Main Brace had, by direction of the Captain, been building up a fire in the little stove, and in the very centre of the cabin he had set out a little table, and upon the little table there was spread the whitest little cloth, and on the cloth were set all round the daintiest little plates and knives and forks, and the neatest little napkins, and the cunningest little cups, that were ever seen.

“And now,” spoke up the Captain, laughing all the while to see his little friends so much surprised, “fall to, fall to! for we’re going to have a jolly feast, or my name isn’t Ancient Mariner, nor John Hardy either.” And the Captain poured out some fresh foaming milk into the cunning little cups, from a big stone jug; and he brought some fresh white rolls andsome golden butter from a little locker; and soon afterward he drew from the little stove some dainty little fish, and dropped one, all crisp and hissing hot, upon each dainty little plate; and now for half an hour there was busy work enough for the dainty little knives and forks. The Captain’s little stove proved to be everything that one could wish for in that line; and the Captain’s style of cooking showed plainly enough, as William said, that “the Captain had not travelled round the world, and been an ancient mariner, for nothing.”

When the meal was over, and everything was cleared away, and the little cabin was once more in ship-shape order, William proposed the Captain’s health,—tossing back his head, and drinking a great quantity of imaginary wine from an imaginary glass. “Here’s to the health of Captain Hardy, ancient mariner, and other things too numerous to mention,—the jolliest Jack Tar that ever reefed a sail, or walked on the windward side of a quarter-deck! May Davy Jones be a long while waiting for him; and when he does go into Davy’s locker, may he go an Admiral!” And then the children all together “Hip, hip, hurrahed” the Captain, until the old man had nearly split himself with laughing at their childish merriment.

“And now for the story,” said the Captain, when the laugh was ended. “What do you say to that?”

“The story,—yes, yes, the story,” shouted all the children, merrier than ever.

“Down here, or up on deck?”

“Down here, just where we are; it’s such a splendid place!”

“Then down here it shall be,” went on the Captain, rightwell pleased. “Down here it shall be, my dears, if I can only pick up the yarn again where I broke it off. Let me see”; and the old man put a finger to his nose, as he always did when he was thoughtful.

“Aha!” cried he, at length, “I’ve got my bearings now, as neat as a light-house in a fog. You know, my dears, when we left off last time, we had gone so far along with the story that you could see the Dean and I had got ourselves in soundings, as it were. We had seen the light-ship off the harbor, and were steering for it, so to speak. We had, by working very hard, and by persevering very much, and by using our wits as best we could, gathered about us everything that was needed to insure our present safety, and some things to make us comfortable. We had a hut to shelter us, and clothes to keep us warm, and fire to cook our food.

“But the winter was now coming on very fast, and we knew well enough what that was likely to be. The grass and moss and flowers were dead or dying; the ice was forming on the little pools, and here and there upon the sea; little spurts of snow were coming now and then; the winds were getting to be more fierce and angry, and every day was growing colder and more dark. We knew that the long winter was close upon us, and that the shadow of the night would soon be resting on us all the time. The birds had hatched their young, and quitted their nests, and were flying off to the sunny south, where we so longed to go, and so longed to send a message by them to the loved ones far away. It made us sad—O, how very, very sad!—to see the birds so happy on the wing, and sailing off and leaving us upon the island all alone. Alone,—all, all alone! Alone upon a desert island in the Frozen Sea! Alone in cold and darkness! All, all alone!

“We made ourselves warm coats and stockings out of the skins of the birds that we had caught; and we made caps, too, out of them,—plucking off the feathers, and leaving only the soft, warm, mouse-colored down upon the skin. And out of the seal’s skin we made mittens and nice soft boots, or rather, as I might call them, moccasins.

“The birds began to go away about the middle of August, as nearly as we could tell, but it was more than a month after that before they had all left the island. Meanwhile we had caught a great number of them,—two hundred and sixty-six in all; and we had collected, besides, ninety dozen of their eggs. These birds and eggs were all carefully stowed away in our storehouses of ice and rocks near the glacier.

“In the matter of food, we had, therefore, done very well; but we felt the need of some more blubber for our fire, and some warmer clothing than the birds’ skins. To supply this latter want, we tried very hard to catch some foxes; but it was a long time before we were successful; for not until all the ducks had gone away would the foxes trouble themselves to go inside our traps. These traps were made of stones, and in building them I had derived the only benefit which had ever resulted to me from my indolent life on the farm. I was always fond of shirking away from my duties, and going into the woods to set rabbit-traps; and, remembering how I made them of wood, I easily contrived a stone one of the same pattern, and it was found afterwards to answer perfectly; for when there were no longer eggs and ducks for them to eat, the foxes went into our traps, which we baited with flesh from the dead narwhal. The pelts of these foxes were thick and warm; and, by the time the weather got very cold, we had obtained a good number, and of them we made suits of clothesat our leisure. There were two kinds of foxes; one was a sort of blue gray, and the other was quite white.

“As the weather grew colder, the little streams which had thus far supplied us with water all froze up; and we had now nothing to depend upon but the freshly fallen snow, which we had, of course, to melt. Thus you see how important it was that I should have found the soapstone in season, and made a pot of it, else we should not only have been obliged to go without boiled food, but likewise without water. As for fuel, we were for the present relieved from all anxiety by a dead walrus and a small white whale which drifted in upon the beach during a westerly gale. The waves being very strong, they were landed so high up on the beach that there was little fear of their being washed away again.

“It was no easy matter to cut these animals up with our one jack-knife, since, before we could get it done, they had frozen quite hard. The temperature had gone down until it was already below freezing all the time; and very soon a great deal of snow fell, and was drifted into heaps by the wind. The sea, soon after this, became frozen over quite solid all about the island, although we could still see plenty of clear, open water in the distance. There was one satisfaction, at least, in this freezing up of the sea: we could walk out upon it, and go all around the island without having to clamber over the rough rocks.

“You have now seen pretty much what our life was on the island, and how we were prepared for the winter. Well, the winter came by and by in good earnest, I can tell you. The sunlight all went away, and then, soon afterward, the autumn twilight went away; and then came the darkness that I toldyou is constant, in the winter, up towards the North Pole, for the winter there is but one long night, you know.”

Here William, who was, as we have seen, of an inquiring turn of mind, interrupted the Captain to ask if he would not be so good as to mention again how dark it was in this polar winter.

“Dark as midnight,” replied the Captain, promptly.

“Dark all the time, did you say, Captain Hardy?”

“Yes, dark all the time, my lad,—dark in the morning, dark in the evening, dark at midnight, dark at noon, dark, all the time, as any night you ever saw; only, everything being white with snow, of course makes the night lighter than it does here, where the trees and the houses, and other dark objects, help along the blackness and make it more gloomy,—absorbing the light, you see, while the snow reflects it.”

“But what,” asked William, “did you do for light in this dark time, since you did not have a lamp?”

“Easy there, my lad,” replied the Captain; “I’m just coming to that, you see. Somebody has said that ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ or words to that effect; and darkness, I think, may be considered a ‘mother’ of that description. First we made an open dish of soapstone, and put some oil in it; and then we made a wick out of the dry moss, and set fire to it; but this was found to make so much smoke that it drove us out of the hut, and it was given up. But we did not throw away the dish, and after a while it occurred to us to powder the dry moss by rubbing it between the hands, and with this powdered moss we lined our soapstone dish all over on the inside with a layer a quarter of an inch thick. After smoothing this down all around the edge (this dish, which we called a lamp, was much like a saucer, only rougher and much larger),we filled it half full of oil, and again set fire to it all around the edge; and this time it worked beautifully,—smoking very little, and giving us plenty of light.”

“How cunning!” exclaimed the children, all at once.

“Rather so,” replied the Captain, “but hardly more so than the two little drinking-cups we carved out of the same kind of soapstone that we made the lamp and pot of.”

“It must have felt very queer, Captain Hardy,” said Fred, inquiringly, “to be in darkness all the time. I can’t imagine such a thing as the winter being all the time dark,—can you, Will?”

“No, I can’t,” replied William,—“can you, Sister Alice?”

“Yes, I think I can,” said Alice, quickly.

“Why, how’s that, my little dear?” asked the Captain, greatly interested.

“O,” said Alice, in her gentle way, “I’ve only to think of poor blind Jo going round with his little dog, begging from door to door, and never seeing anything in all the world,—no sun, no moon, no stars, no any light to him at all. Poor Jo’s bright summer went out long ago; and both light and warmth were gone, never to come back again, when old Martha died! and all’s night to Jo,—and that’s how I know what it is to be in darkness all the time”; and as little Alice made this little speech about poor blind Jo, the beggar-man, her lovely face looked thoughtful beyond its years; and, as she finished, the Captain saw a tear stealing from her soft blue eye for poor Jo’s sake; and he caught her in his arms right off, without stopping to think at all what he was doing, and he kissed away the tear; and, as he did it, a much bigger one came tearing out of his own great hazel eye, and hurried down into his shaggy beard to hide, as if it were quite frightened at what it had been doing with itself.

“Spoken like the little lady that you are, my dear,” broke out the Captain; “always thinking of the unfortunate. And you are very right, my child. Poor blind Jo’s darkness is much worse than ours ever was, up in the Frozen Sea, upon the lonely island,—far worse indeed, poor man! for you must know that the stars were shining brightly there upon us all the time; and then the moon came every month; and when it came, it came for good and all, and never set for several days; and then sometimes the aurora borealis would flash across the heavens, and clear away the darkness for a little while, as if it were a huge broom sweeping cobwebs from the skies, and letting in the light of day beneath the stars. O, what a splendid sight it was!”

“O, tell us all about it, Captain Hardy, won’t you?” asked all the children, with one voice.

“Of course, I will,” replied the Captain, “only I can do no sort of justice to that species of natural scenery, don’t you see? That’s a touch beyond John Hardy’s powers of description, as I can well assure you.”

The children all declared that they never could think anything beyond John Hardy’s powers, and they believed it too.

“Well, well! Now let me see, my dears, what I can do for you. First, you know the scientific chaps, especially my friend the Doctor, down in Boston, say that the aurora borealis is electricity broke loose, and tearing through the air, from pole to pole, for some purpose of its own. It can’t be caught, nor bottled up, as Franklin bottled up the lightning, nor analyzed;—in short, nothing can be done with it; and so it goes tearing through the skies, as I have said before, from pole to pole, just where it likes.

“Now this is what it is, so far as one can see. When you go away beyond the Arctic Circle, you see great fiery streams start up from a fiery arch that stretches right across the sky before you; and from this fiery arch the fiery streams of light shoot up, and then fall back again,—sometimes lasting for a little while, and waving in the sky, to and fro, like a silken curtain of many colors fluttering in the wind; and then again seeming to be phantom things playing hide-and-seek among the stars; sometimes like wicked spirits of the night, bent on mischief; sometimes like tongues of flame from some great fire in some great world beyond the earth, making one almost afraid that the heavens will break out presently in a roaring blaze, and rain a shower of living coals and ashes on his head.

“And O, how grand the colors are sometimes! The great arch of light that spans the sky is often bright with all the colors of the rainbow,—changing every instant. And from these flickering belts of light the fiery streams fly up with lightning speed,—green, and orange, and blue, and purple, and bright crimson,—all mingling here and there and everywhere above, while down beneath comes out in bold relief before the eye the broad, white plain of ice and snow upon the ocean, the great icebergs that lie here and there upon it, the tall white mountains of the land, and the dark islands in the sea; and then the flood of light dies away, and the dark islands in the sea, and the tall white mountains, and the icebergs, and the white plain around, all vanish from the sight, and the mind retains only an impression that the icebergs, with all these bright hues reflected on them from above, had come from space and darkness, like the meteors, then to vanish, and leave the darkness more profound.

“And thus the auroral light and color keep pulsating in the air, up and down, up and down; and thus the icebergs seem to come and go; and the very stars above seem to be rushing out with a bold bright glare, and going back again as quickly, singed and withered, as it were, into puny sparks, and, utterly disheartened with the effort to keep their places in the face of such a flood of brightness, are at length resolved no more to try to twinkle, twinkle through the night.

“And that is all I can tell you about the aurora borealis, for that is all I know about it.”

“O, isn’t he a great one?” whispered William to Fred, who sat close beside him on the locker,—“isn’t he, indeed?—to say he can’t describe an aurora borealis, when he has blood, thunder, fire, and all creation on his tongue.”

“But,” went on the Captain, “in spite of this auroral light and the moonlight, the winter was dreary enough. At first we wanted to sleep all the time; and we had much trouble to keep ourselves from giving way to this desire. If we had done so, it would have made us very unhealthy and altogether miserable. We had to keep up our spirits, whatever else we did; and after a while, to help us with this, we got into regular habits; and we set a great clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day.”

“A clock up in the sky!” exclaimed both the boys; “why, Captain Hardy, how was that?”

“Why, don’t you see, my lads, the ‘Great Bear’ and all the other constellations of the north go round and round the Pole-star, which is right above your head; and it so happened that I knew the ‘Great Bear,’ and the two stars in its side called ‘the Pointers’ because they point to the Pole-star. Now these two ‘Pointers,’ going around once in the four-and-twentyhours, pointed up from the south at one time, and up from the north at another time, and up from the east and from the west in the same way; and thus you see we had a clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day, for we had an iceberg picked out all around for every hour, and when ‘the Pointers’ stood over that particular berg we knew what time it was.

“We should have got along through the winter much more comfortably if we had had some books, or some paper to write on, and pen and ink to write with; but these things were quite beyond the reach of our ingenuity. So our life was very monotonous; doing our daily duties,—that is, whatever we might find to do,—and, after wading through the deep snow in doing it, we came back again to our little hut to get warm, and to eat and talk and sleep.

“And much talking we did, as I can assure you, about each other, and each other’s life, and what great things we would do when we got away from the island, hopeless though that seemed. Thus we came gradually to know each other’s history, and thus there came to be greater sympathy between us, and more indulgence of each other’s whims and fancies, as we got better and better acquainted.

“The Dean had quite a story to relate of himself. He told me that he was born in the great city of New York. His father died before he could remember, and his mother was very poor; but so long as she kept her health she managed, in one way or another, to live along from day to day by sewing; and she managed, too, to send the Dean to school. She loved her bright-haired little boy so very, very much that she would have spent the last cent she could ever earn, could she only give her darling Dean a little knowledge that might help him on in the world when he grew to be a man. And so shestinted herself and saved, all unknown to her darling Dean; and she had not clothing or fire enough to keep her warm in the bleak winter, when the Dean was out, though she had a fine fire when the Dean came back. All would have been well enough if the poor woman had not, with her hard work and her efforts to save, become thin and weak, and then grown sick with fever; and now there was nothing for her but the hospital, for there was no money to pay for medicines, or doctor’s bills, to say nothing of rent and fire and clothes.

“And now for the first time the Dean began to realize the situation; and a vague impression crossed his mind, that the poor, pale woman, now restless with pain on a narrow bed in a great long ward of a dreary hospital,—his own dear mother, suffering here with strange hands only to comfort her,—had been brought to this for his sake; and when she grew better, after a long, long time, but was still far from well, he thought and thought, and cried and cried, and prayed and prayed, and wished that he might do something to show his gratitude, and make amends.

“By and by he got into a factory, and worked there early and late, until he too grew sick, and was carried to the hospital, and was laid beside his poor sick mother, on a narrow bed. But he soon got well again, though his mother did not, and then (he could do nothing else) he went to sea as cabin-boy of a ship sailing to Havana; and he came back too; and, with a proud heart beating in his little breast, he carried a little purse of gold and silver coins that the captain gave him to his poor sick mother; and then he went away again on the same ship, and came back once more with another purse of money, twice as big as the first; but the good captain that had been so kind to him, and rewarded him so well, fell sick, and died of yellowfever on the passage home, and the mate, who got command of the ship, being a different sort of man, disliked the Dean, and told him not to come back any more. And so the poor Dean didn’t know what to do; until one of his old shipmates met him in the street, and took him off to New Bedford, and shipped him as cabin-boy of theBlackbird. ‘And now here I am,’ said the poor little Dean, ‘and all the rest you know,—cast away in the cold, in this awful place, while my poor sick mother has no money and no friends in all the world, and is thinking all the time what a wretch I am to run away and desert her, when, God knows, I meant to do nothing of the sort!’ and so the Dean burst out crying, and, to tell you the truth, I could not help crying a little too.

“But the Dean was a right plucky little fellow, I can tell you; and so full of hope and ambition was he, that nothing could keep him down very long; and nothing, I believe, could ever make him despond for a single minute but thinking of his mother, sick and far away, without friends or money, lying on a narrow bed, all through the weary, dreary days and nights, in the dreary ward of a crowded hospital. Poor Dean! he had something to make him cry, and something always to make him sad, if he had a mind to be; but what had I in comparison?—I who had gone away from home with no good motive like the Dean’s.

“After the recital of this story of the Dean’s, we were both very sad, until the Dean suddenly roused himself, and said, ‘Let’s go and look at our traps, Hardy’; and so we sallied out into the moonlight, and waded through the snow, to see if there were any foxes for us. To get outside our hut was not so easy a matter now as it was when we first built it; for, in order to keep the cold winds away, we had made a long, low,narrow passage, with a crook in it, through which we crawled on our hands and knees, before we reached the door.

“We walked all the way around the island, and visited all our traps, of which we had seventeen, but only two of them had foxes in them; the others were either filled with snow, or were completely covered over with it, for the wind had been blowing very hard the day before.

“As we got farther and farther into the winter, we met with some very strange adventures,—altogether different from anything I have told you of before; but you see the sun will soon be going down behind the trees, and we are a good long way from the ‘Mariner’s Rest,’ so ‘up anchor’ ’s the word now, my dears, and ‘under way’ again.”

The merry little yacht was not long in carrying the merry little party over to the Captain’s favorite anchorage; and then they were all soon ashore, and after many merry and many pleasant speeches, our little friends parted from the ancient mariner once more, leaving him standing in the shadow of the great tall trees, with a string of fish in one hand; while Fred and William, with Main Brace to help them, and with merry Alice running on ahead, each carried off a string for their next day’s breakfast,—a trophy to be proud of, as they thought.

CHAPTER XIV.Proves the Ingenuity of Seals, and Shows That the Great Polar Bear Is No Respecter of Persons

“When we were last time cruising in theAlice, I think I told you all about the Arctic winter,—did I not?” said the ancient mariner to his little friends, when they were met once more.

“Yes,” answered William (who was always ready to act as spokesman for the party),—“yes, Captain Hardy, all about the Arctic winter, and the aurora borealis, and the wonderful moonlight, and the darkness, and how you and the handsome little Dean lived through it, and what you talked about, and how you passed the time, and what a doleful life you led, and what a dreadful thing it was, and how it made you shiver now to think of it; and—all that, and a great deal more.”

“Certainly,” replied the Captain, “certainly, that’s it,—all told off nicely, my lad, just as if you were boxing the compass or repeating the multiplication table;—all about how we protected ourselves from cold, and kept ourselves from hunger, and prepared a home for ourselves on the Rock of Good Hope. And this seemed likely to be our home for life too,—so far, at least, as we could see; for it appeared clear enough to us that our condition would never change except with death, which we, like everybody else, whether they have ever been cast away or not, wanted to put off as long as possible, having no wish at all to die, and not liking either to freeze or starve: so you see we had good motives for energy and patience.”

Here little Alice, in her quiet way, interrupted the Captain to say that the aurora borealis had troubled her dreams all night, and that she would like to know, if the Captain pleased, why anything should have such a strange name.

“That I will tell you with pleasure, my dear,” answered the Captain; “I’ll tell you all about it,—of course I will. Aurora borealis,—that means northern light; and the name comes from a pagan goddess called Aurora, who was supposed to have rosy fingers, and to ride in a rosy chariot, and who opened the gates of the East every morning, and brought in the light of day; and thus, in course of time, any great flush of light in the heavens got to be called Aurora. And then there was a pagan god called Boreas, who was the North Wind, and had long wings and white hair, and made himself generally disagreeable. So you see Boreas, from being the pagan name for north wind, got to mean the north; and Borealis, from that, became Northern, and Aurora Borealis became Northern Light.”

“Thank you, Captain Hardy,” said little Alice; and Fred and William said “Thank you” too; while, as for the Captain, he looked very wise and solemn, like other great philosophers, appearing as if he would say, “Don’t be surprised, for that’s nothing to what I could do if I had a mind,” every word of which the children would have believed, you may well be sure. However, the Captain hastened on with the story (which is more to our present purpose) without giving any further proof of his learning.

“When the winter had fairly set in,” said he, “our field of operations was much enlarged; and, although the birds had all flown away, we were hardly worse off than before, as you shall see; for all through the summer we had been kept close prisonerson the island; but now, when the ice was solid all over the sea, we could walk out upon it, and this we did as soon as it would bear. Once the Dean broke through, being a little careless of where he was stepping; but I got him out, with no more harm coming to him than a cold bath and a fright.

“Soon after this we made a valuable discovery. Some of the seals have a habit, when the sea is frozen over, of cutting holes through the ice with their sharp claws, in order that they may get their heads above the water to breathe,—the seals not being able, as I have told you before, to breathe under water, like fish. They can keep their heads under water about an hour, by closing up their nostrils, so that not a drop can get in; and, during that time, they do not breathe at all; but at last they must find the open sea, or a crack in the ice, or else dig a hole through the ice from below, and thus get their heads to the surface in some way, or they would drown.

“As we did not then know anything about the habits of the seals in this respect, I was very much surprised one day, while walking over ice that was everywhere apparently very solid, to find one of my feet suddenly break through. I was carrying, at the time, our great narwhal horn, which had already been used for so many purposes; and when I had got my foot, as quickly as possible, out of the water, I pounded with the heavy horn all about the place, and found that there was a large round hole there that had evidently been made by some animal; and I could think of nothing else as likely to have made it but a seal. The reason why I had not seen it was because the snow had drifted over it in a hard crust, and through this crust the seal kept open with his nose asmall orifice for breathing, that was not larger round than a silver dollar.

“This discovery made us very glad and very curious,—for, having concluded what it was, we concluded also that there must be more like it, and we went in search of them immediately. Our search was soon rewarded, for these seal-holes were very numerous.

“How to catch a seal was the question which now most occupied our thoughts. The difficulty was very great, for we had no weapons of any sort for such a purpose. Once more, however, we fell back upon our narwhal horn. To this horn we had already become much attached, and, as if to express our gratitude, we had bestowed upon it several names,—as, for instance, ‘Life-preserver,’ ‘Crumply Crowbar,’ ‘The Castaway’s Friend,’ and the like of that; but the title which finally stuck to it was ‘Old Crumply,’—not that it was exactly a crumply horn, like the one that grew on the head of the cow that tossed the dog, that worried the cat, that killed the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built,—for it was not crumply at all in that sense, but, on the contrary, was as straight as an arrow, and was no further crumply than crumply means wrinkled and twisted; and, indeed, the old horn looked as if it might have been once red-hot, and had been twisted several times around before it had cooled off.

“Besides this ‘Old Crumply,’ we made another weapon, in quite an ingenious way, as we thought, though at a great expense of time and labor. This was called by several names, like the other; but generally I called it the ‘Dean’s Delight,’ for it was made after the Dean’s idea, and he used to flourish it about at a great rate, and was very proud of it. It wassimply a kind of spear made by lashing together (after carefully cutting with our knife, and fitting and overlapping) a great many pieces of bones. The lashing was the same string or thong we had before used for the duck-traps. It was very strong, though not half so heavy as ‘Old Crumply.’

“But though we had ‘Old Crumply,’ and the ‘Dean’s Delight,’ we were apparently just as far off as ever from catching a seal. The ‘Delight’ was tipped with hard ivory (a piece of walrus tusk carved into proper shape with the jack-knife), and ‘Crumply’ was of the very best kind of ivory throughout, yet we could not sharpen either of them so as to be of much use. But, remembering the general shape of the harpoon-heads used in whale-ships, I managed to cut one of that pattern out of walrus ivory, and this I set on the end of the ‘Dean’s Delight,’ and then, making a hole in the centre of it, I fastened it to the end of one of our long lines. And thus I had obtained all that was needed, in name at least, for catching a seal; but only in name, as was soon proved; for the Dean and I set out at once to try our fortunes in this new line of adventure, and, discovering a seal-hole, we stood near it (on the leeward side, that the seal might not scent us) until the animal appeared, which was not for a long time, and not until we had grown very cold. The seal had evidently been off breathing in another hole. When he did come up, we knew it by a little puff he gave, which threw some spray up through the little orifice in the snow-crust. Quick as thought I plunged the ‘Dean’s Delight’ down into the very centre of the hole, and struck the animal; but the ivory harpoon-head that was on the end of it only glanced off, without penetrating the skin; and the seal, no doubt very much astonished, got off as quickly as he could, more frightened, probably, than hurt; at least, we heard of himno more. He never came back to the hole, for it was all frozen over next day, and so it remained. We afterwards discovered that when a seal-hole has been once touched, the seal will never go back to it.

“I was now more puzzled than ever to know what to do; but I did not give up trying, determined to succeed, one way or another. Presently it occurred to me that almost anything that was hard would answer to sharpen the edge and point of the ivory harpoon-head, and, since I could not get any kind of metal to make a whole harpoon-head out of, I had to try some other plan. As good luck would have it, I now thought of the brass buttons on my coat. Some of these I quickly tore off. Then I hacked my knife with a sharp flint stone until I had made a saw of it, and with this saw I cut a little groove along the tapering point of the ivory harpoon-head; and into this groove, which was about a quarter of an inch deep, I set the buttons, which I had squared with the knife, and then wedged them firmly. I had now only to grind all these bits of brass down even, and to sharpen the whole with a stone, and my work was done. And a most tedious work it had been too. The next thing was to put it to the test, which we quickly did. A seal-hole being soon found, we had not long to wait before the seal came into it, with a little puff, as before; and, as soon as the noise was heard, I let fly with my harpoon, and, striking through the snow-crust, hit the seal fairly in the neck, and drove the harpoon into him.

“Down sank the seal through the hole, taking the harpoon along with him, and spinning out the line which was attached to it at a furious rate. Before the seal was struck, and while I was watching for him, the Dean had quietly tied the end of the line that was not fast to the harpoon around the middle of‘Old Crumply,’ and when the seal descended into the sea, ‘Old Crumply’ was whipped along over the snow until it lodged right across the hole, and there the seal was,—‘brought up with a round turn,’ as the sailors say.

“And now was anybody ever so rejoiced as we? The Dean fairly shouted with delight, and danced around the hole as if he were crazy, crying ‘Bravo, bravo!’ and ‘Hurrah for Crumply’ and ‘Hurrah for Old Crumply!’ and hurrah for this, and hurrah for that, until he was fairly hoarse. Meanwhile the seal was trying his best to get away. He darted from side to side, and up and down, without any other result than to tire himself out; for the harpoon held firmly in his body, and the line held firmly to ‘Old Crumply,’ and ‘Old Crumply’ lay squarely across the hole.

“By and by the seal was forced to come up to breathe; and, since there was no other place for him, he had to return to the hole where he had been struck. But he did not stay more than a second or so, going down as quickly as he had done before. As soon as the line was loosened, however, we drew in the slack, and wound it around ‘Old Crumply,’ so that the seal did not have so much of it now to play with. Nor did he remain under so long the second time. When he came up again, we got in all the slack of the line that we could, as before.

“It was now clear enough that we should be sure of the seal, if we could only get something to kill him with; and so the quick-witted Dean ran off at once to the hut, and brought a walrus tusk that we had saved. This was driven into the hard snow not far from the hole, and, while the Dean held it there firmly, I got the line made fast around it. As soon as I saw that this was secure, and that the Dean was holding onbravely, I unfastened the line from ‘Old Crumply,’ and, when the seal came next time, I gave him a heavy thrust with the sharp end of it. But this did not kill him by any means, nor did he give me another chance for some time. Then, however, he was almost dead with bleeding, and fright, and hard struggling to get away, to say nothing of holding his breath so long; but I wanted him too badly to have any mercy on him,so I worked away as hard as I could to get in all the line, so that the seal could not sink down through the hole any more.

Back to IndexNext