between your fingers. And the worst was to come, bad luck!"

"What? Go on, Paddy! What did he and the boy do?"

"They just eat each other," faltered Pat. "But, Heaven be praised! a
whaler fetched off the survivor. It was then that he got the bad fever
though, so maybe he dreamt the worst."

I felt great sympathy with Pat's evident disrelish for this tale, but
the oldest and hairiest sailor seemed hardly to regard it as worth
calling an adventure. If you wanted to see ice that was ice, you should
try the coast of Greenland, he said. "Hartic Hexploration for choice,
but seals or blubber took you pretty far up. He remembered the
Christmas he lost _them two_." (And cocking one leg over the other, he
drew a worsted sock from his foot, and displayed the fact that his great
toe and the one next to it were gone.) "They lost more than toes that
time too. You might believe it gave you a lonelyish kind of feel when
there was no more to be done for the ship but get as much firewood out
of her timber as you could, and all you had in the way of a home was
huts on an ice-floe, and a white fox, with a black tip to its tail, for
a pet. It wouldn't have lasted long, except for discipline," we young
'uns might take notice. "Pleasure's all very well ashore, where a man
may go his own way a long time, and show his nasty temper at home, and
there's other folks about him doing double duty to make up for it and
keep things together; but when you come to a handful of men cast adrift
to make a world for themselves, as one may say, Lord bless you! there's
nothing's any good then but making every man do as he's bid and be
content with what he gets--and clearing him out if he won't. It was a
hard winter at that. But regularity pulled us through. Reg'lar work,
reg'lar ways, reg'lar rations and reg'lar lime-juice, as long as it
lasted. And not half a bad Christmas we didn't have neither, and poor
Sal's Christmas-tree was the best part of it. 'What sort of a
Christmas-tree, and why Sal's?' Well, the carpenter put it up, and an
uncommon neat thing he made too, of pinewood and birch-broom, and some
of the men hung it over with paper chains. And then the carpenter opened
the bundle Sal made him take his oath he wouldn't open till Christmas,
whatever came, and I'm blest if there wasn't a pair of brand-new socks
for every soul of the ship's crew. Not that we were so badly off for
socks, but washing 'em reg'lar, and never being able to get 'em really
dry,