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INCIDENTS OF ARCTIC TRAVEL.

E. K. KANE.

[Elisha Kent Kane, who is known to the world principally through his connection with Arctic exploration, was one of the most active of American travellers. Previous to his Arctic journeys he had visited China, India, Ceylon, and the Philippines, made an excursion to the Himalayas, ascended the Nile to Nubia, and explored Greece on foot. He served in the Mexican war, was surgeon in the first United States expedition in search of Sir John Franklin, and commanded the second expedition. The first journey he described in a volume entitled "The United States Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin ;” the second in a highly-interesting work entitled "Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853, '54, and '55." From the first-named we make a brief extract, illustrative of some of the discomforts of Arctic life. Dr. Kane was born in Philadelphia in 1820. He died in Havana in 1857, a victim to the hardships of his adventurous life.]

I EMPLOYED the dreary intervals of leisure that heralded our Christmas in tracing some Flemish portraitures of things about me. The scenes themselves had interest at the time for the parties who figured in them; and I believe that is reason enough, according to the practice of modern academics, for submitting them to the public eye. I copy them from my scrap-book, expurgating only a little.

"We have almost reached the solstice; and things are so quiet that I may as well, before I forget it, tell you something about the cold in its sensible effects, and the way in which as sensible people we met it.

"You will see, by turning to the early part of my journal, that the season we now look back upon as the perfection of summer contrast to this outrageous winter was in fact no summer at all. We had the young ice forming round us in Baffin's Bay, and were measuring

snow-falls, while you were sweating under your grasscloth. Yet I remember it as a time of sunny recreation, when we shot bears upon the floes, and were scrambling merrily over glaciers and murdering rotges in the bright glare of our day-midnight. Like a complaining brute, I thought it cold then,-I, who am blistered if I touch a brass button or a ramrod without a woollen mit.

"The cold came upon us gradually. The first thing that really struck me was the freezing up of our water-casks, the drip-candle appearance of the bung-holes, and our inability to lay the tin cup down for a five-minutes' pause. without having its contents made solid. Next came the complete inability to obtain drink without manufacturing it. For a long time we had collected our water from the beautiful fresh pools of the icebergs and floes; now we had to quarry out the blocks in flinty, glassy lumps, and then melt it in tins for our daily drink. This was in Wellington Channel.

"By and by the sludge which we passed through as we travelled became pancakes and snow-balls. We were glued up. Yet even as late as the 11th of September I collected a flowering Potentilla from Barlow's Inlet. But now any

thing moist or wet began to strike me as something to be looked at, a curious, out-of-the-way production, like the bits of broken ice round a can of mint-julep. Our decks became dry, and studded with botryoidal lumps of dirty foot-trodden ice. The rigging had nightly accumulations of rime, and we learned to be careful about coiled ropes and iron-work. On the 4th of October we had a mean temperature below zero.

"By this time our little entering hatchway had become so complete a mass of icicles that we had to give it up and resort to our winter door-way. The opening of a door was now the signal for a gush of smoke-like vapor;

every stove-pipe sent out clouds of purple steam; and a man's breath looked like the firing of a pistol on a small scale.

"All our eatables became laughably consolidated, and after different fashions, requiring no small experience before we learned to manage the peculiarities of their changed condition. Thus, dried apples became one solid breccial mass of impacted angularities, a conglomerate of sliced chalcedony. Dried peaches the same. To get these out of the barrel, or the barrel out of them, was a matter impossible. We found, after many trials, that the shortest and best plan was to cut up both fruit and barrel by repeated blows with a heavy axe, taking the lumps below to thaw. Saur-kraut resembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A crow-bar with chiselled edge extracted the lamina badly; but it was perhaps the best thing we could resort to.

"Sugar formed a very funny compound. Take q. 8. of cork raspings, and incorporate therewith another q. s. of liquid gutta-percha or caoutchouc, and allow to harden; this extemporaneous formula will give you the brown sugar of our winter cruise. Extract with the saw; nothing but the saw will suit. Butter and lard, less changed, require a heavy cold-chisel and mallet. Their fracture is conchoidal, with hæmatitic (iron-ore pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little change, and molasses can at -28° be half scooped, half cut, by a stiff iron ladle.

"Pork and beef are rare specimens of Florentine mosaic, emulating the lost art of petrified visceral monstrosities seen at the medical schools of Bologna and Milan: crowbar and handspike! for at -30° the axe can hardly chip it. A barrel sawed in half, and kept for two days in the caboose-house at +76°, was still as refractory as flint a few inches below the surface. A similar bulk of lamp oil,

denuded of the staves, stood like a yellow sandstone roller for a gravel walk.

"Ices for the dessert come, of course, unbidden, in all imaginable and unimaginable variety. I have tried my inventive powers on some of them. A Roman punch, a good deal stronger than the noblest Roman ever tasted, forms readily at -20°. Some sugared cranberries, with a little butter and scalding water, and you have an impromptu strawberry ice. Many a time at those funny little jams that we call in Philadelphia "parties," where the lady hostess glides with such nicely regulated indifference through the complex machinery she has brought together, I have thought I noticed her stolen glance of anxiety at the cooing doves whose icy bosoms were melting into one upon the supper-table before their time. We order these things better in the Arctic. Such is the "composition and fierce quality" of our ices that they are brought in served on the shaft of a hickory broom,-a transfixing rod which we use as a stirrer first and a fork afterward. So hard is this terminating cylinder of ice that it might serve as a truncheon to knock down an ox. The only difficulty is in the processes that follow. It is the work of time and energy to impress it with the carving-knife, and you must handle your spoon deftly, or it fastens to your tongue. One of our mess was tempted the other day by the crystal transparency of an icicle to break it in his mouth; one piece froze to his mouth, and two others to his lips, and each carried off the skin: the thermometer was at -28°.

"Thus much for our Arctic grub. I need not say that our preserved meats would make very fair cannon-balls, canister-shot."

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THE TOTAL DEPRAVITY OF INANIMATE THINGS.

MRS. E. A. WALKER.

[It is remarkable with what impish malignity, if you drop a penny or a button to the floor, it at once makes its way to some remote corner of the room, and defies search for an exasperating measure of valuable time. The placid, sleepy, dull-faced thing seems to overflow with mischievous life the instant it leaves the fingers, and when you stoop, "good, easy soul, full sure" to pick it up at your feet, the chances are a hundred to one that it has scampered away into some mysterious nook, where it does its best to hide itself by "protective resemblance.” This is only one phase of the total depravity of the inanimate. It takes on a thousand forms, and most of us have experienced as full a share of its vagaries as those which Mrs. Walker so amusingly depicts. A lady friend relates that on one occasion she was amusing a child with a small rubber ball, flinging it into the air and letting it rebound on the floor. At the final upward fling that ball did not visibly descend again. The room was thoroughly searched for it in vain. The yard, on which the window looked, was searched with equal thoroughness and equal uselessness. Days, months, years passed on, house-cleaning seasons came and went, but the vanished ball has never yet been found. If it had been snatched by the hand of some invisible afrit in the air it could not have disappeared in a more mysterious manner. Instances of this depravity of inanimate things might be innumerably duplicated. But we must yield the floor to Mrs. Walker.]

I AWOKE very early in life to the consciousness that I held the doctrine which we are considering.

On a hapless day when I was perhaps five years old, I was, in my own estimation, intrusted with the family dignity, when I was deposited for a day at the house of a lordly Pharisee of the parish, with solemnly-repeated instructions in table-manners and the like.

One who never analyzed the mysteries of a sensitive child's heart cannot appreciate the sense of awful respon

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