elter, and almost of life,
was a God-send to our disheartened spirits, and I hardly knew in my
excitement what I did. I remember now walking hastily back and forth
in front of the snow-drift, repeating softly to myself at every step,
"Thank God!" "Thank God!" but at the time I was not conscious of
anything except the great fact that we had found that party. Dodd, who
had been roused from his half-frozen lethargy by the strong excitement
of the discovery, now suggested that we try to find the entrance to
the house and get in as quickly, as possible, as he was nearly dead
from cold and exhaustion. There was no sound of life in the lonely
snow-drift before us, and the inmates, if it had any, were evidently
asleep. Seeing no sign anywhere of a door, I walked up on the drift,
and shouted down through the stove-pipe in tremendous tones, "Halloo
the house!" A startled voice from under my feet demanded "Who's
there?"

"Come out and see! Where's the door?"

My voice seemed to the astounded Americans inside to come out of
the stove--a phenomenon which was utterly unparalleled in all their
previous experience; but they reasoned very correctly that any stove
which could ask in good English for the door in the middle of the
night had an indubitable right to be answered; and they replied in
a hesitating and half-frightened tone that the door was "on the
south-east corner." This left us about as wise as before. In the first
place we did not know which way south-east was, and in the second
a snow-drift could not properly be described as having a corner. I
started around the stove-pipe, however, in a circle, with the hope of
finding some sort of an entrance. The inmates had dug a deep ditch or
trench about thirty feet in length for a doorway, and had covered it
over with sticks and reindeerskins to keep out the drifting snow.
Stepping incautiously upon this frail roof I fell through just as one
of the startled men was coming out in his shirt and drawers, holding a
candle above his head, and peering through the darkness of the tunnel
to see who would enter. The sudden descent through the roof of such an
apparition as I knew myself to be, was not calculated to restore the
steadiness of startled nerves. I had on two heavy _kukhlankas_ which
swelled out my figure to gigantic proportions; two thick reindeerskin
hoods with long frosty fringes of black bearskin were pulled up over
my head, a squirrelskin mask frozen into a sheet of ice conce