ng snake-like
along the coast as far as eye could reach. "To-morrow!" I exclaimed,
"we will be there." "Yes!" replied a friend, "but if the breeze
freshens, Penny will reach it to-night!" And there, sure enough, were
Penny's brigs sailing past our squadron, which showed no sign of
vitality beyond that of the officer of the watch visiting the
ice-anchors to see all was right. "That fellow, Penny, is no sluggard!"
we muttered, "and will yet give the screws a hard tussle to beat him."

A couple of hours rest, and having taken the ship in tow, we again
proceeded, and at about seven o'clock on the morning of the 2d of July
passed the "Sophia," and shortly afterwards, the "Lady Franklin." Alas!
poor Penny, he had a light contrary wind to work against.

I do not think my memory can recall in the course of my wanderings any
thing more novel or striking than the scenes through which we steamed
this forenoon. The land of Greenland, so bold, so steep, and in places
so grim, with the long fields of white glittering ice floating about on
the cold blue sea, and our little vessels (for we looked pigmies beside
the huge objects around us, whether cliff, berg, or glacier) stealing
on so silently and quickly; the leadsman's song or the flap of wild
fowl the only sounds to break the general stillness. One of the cliffs
we skirted along was actually teeming with birds called "loons:" they
might have been shot in tens of hundreds had we required them or time
not pressed: they are considered remarkably good eating, and about the
size and weight of an ordinary duck: to naturalists they are known by
the name of guillemot, and were christened "loons" by the early Dutch
navigators, in consequence of their stupidity. Numerous seals lay on
the ice in the offing, and their great size astonished us.

As we advanced, a peculiarly conical island, in a broad and
ice-encumbered bay, showed itself: it was "the Sugar-Loaf Island" of
the whalers; and told us that, on rounding the farther headland, we
should see the far-famed Devil's Thumb, the boundary of Melville Bay.

A block of ice brought us up after a tow of some twenty-five or thirty
miles, and, each vessel picking up a convenient iceberg, we made fast
to await an opening.

I landed to obtain a view from a small islet close to the "Pioneer,"
and was rewarded by observing that the Duck Islands, a group some
fifteen miles to seaward of us, had evidently a large space of open
water around them, and