me as I walked the
reeling bridge or clung to its rail, and held my breath when some green
wall crashed down upon our forecastle deck. But the westward sky seemed
to be made of chilled steel, and out of its pitiless lips blew one gale
after another, and all full of a biting cold that made the name of
summer a foolish jest. For two weeks, inch by inch, the _Bristow_,
running her engine at its full power, fought her way against a series of
westerly gales. The decks were white with crusted salt, and the
iron-work became browned with rust, until the ship began to look old and
haggard from her struggle with the elements. But the worst had not come
yet. On the seventeenth day out, while I was at my dinner, the
pale-faced boy and his father sitting opposite to me and gazing at me in
mournful silence, the chief engineer came to me with a grave
countenance, and asked me to step aside that he might speak with me.

"'Captain,' said he, 'I am sorry to tell you that the coal in our
bunkers is getting very low, and that unless we make better headway it
will run out before we make port.'

"'Cut up all the spare wood in the hold,' I said, 'and feed that to the
furnaces.'

"The engineer went away shaking his head, and then the boy came up to me
and said,

"'Captain, are we ever going to get home?'

"'Oh yes,' I said, with an effort to appear cheerful; 'of course we are.
We're doing very well now.'

"The boy looked at me reproachfully and walked away. His father hadn't
said a word to me for two days. But I declare it wasn't my fault. Well,
you may think we had had our share of trouble, but we were not through
yet. On the afternoon of July 20th several large ice-floes were sighted,
and that night the ship ran into a dense field of ice. By this time most
of our spare wood had been burned, and we were depending largely on our
sails to carry us along, while the wind, which was still blowing half a
gale, was almost dead ahead. And here we were in an ice-field that
hemmed us in as far as the eye could see. The temperature of the air was
bitterly cold, and it seemed as if we had been plunged into the midst of
arctic regions. The ice-floes crashed and groaned, gulls whirled
phantomlike and screaming above our stained spars, and all the time the
wind blew against us as if some supernatural force were bent on driving
us back. On the evening of the 21st the ship's carpenter came to me and
said,

"'Captain, there are six inches of water in