rking in my cabin I used often to hear them singing "Annie Rooney,"
"McGinty," "The Spanish Cavalier," and sometimes "Home, Sweet Home."
Nobody seemed to be bored. Percy, who had special charge of the
phonograph, often treated the men to a concert, and all through the
winter I heard nobody complain of monotony or homesickness.

CHAPTER XX

CHRISTMAS ON THE ROOSEVELT

The four December field parties returned to the ship one after the
other. Captain Bartlett was the only one who had found any game, and he
got only five hares. During this trip the captain had an experience
which might have been decidedly uncomfortable for him, had it turned out
a bit less fortunately. He was up in the Lake Hazen region with his
Eskimos, and he had left them at the igloo while he looked around for
game. He had just found some deer tracks when the moon went behind a
bank of clouds and the night became suddenly black.

He waited an hour or two for the moon to come out that he might see
where he was, and meanwhile the two Eskimos, thinking he was lost, broke
camp and set out for the ship. As soon as there was light enough, he
started off to the south of the igloo, and after a time overtook his
companions. Had he gone even a little way to the north he would not have
met them, and would have had to walk back alone to the ship, without
supplies, a distance of seventy or eighty miles, with a storm brewing.

This party had bad weather nearly all the way home. The temperature was
comparatively mild, only ten or fifteen degrees below zero, and the sky
was overcast. The captain made the last march a long one,
notwithstanding the darkness. Of course he could not always keep the
trail. Sometimes he would be walking along over snow as level as a
floor, then suddenly the level would drop ten or fifteen feet, and,
walking right on in the dark, he would land on the back of his head with
such force that he saw stars which do not appear in any scientific
celestial map.

At one point in the journey they struck going so rough that it was
impossible to push ahead and drive the dogs without light. They had no
lantern, but Bartlett took a sugar tin, cut holes in the sides, and put
a candle in it. With this makeshift beacon he was able to keep somewhere
near the trail. But there was considerable wind, and he declared that he
used enough matches in relighting the candle on that march to keep an
Eskimo family cheerful throughout a whole winter.

The f