roaring of wind, the rushing of seas,
and the crashing falls of masses of ice to render it frightful."

"You tell me," said I, "that when you fell asleep"--I would sometimes
express his frozen state thus--"there was a quarter of a mile of ice
beyond the schooner's stern."

"At least a quarter of a mile," he answered. "Day after day it would be
built up till it came to a face of that extent."

I thought to myself if it has taken forty-eight years of the wear and
tear of storm and surge to extinguish a quarter of a mile, how long a
time must elapse before this island splits up? But then I reflected that
during the greater part of those years this seat of ice had been stuck
very low south where the cold was so extreme as to make it defy
dissolution; that since then, it was come away from the main and
stealing north, so that what might have taken thirty years to accomplish
in seventy degrees of south latitude, might be performed in a day on the
parallel of sixty degrees in the summer season in these seas.

Tassard continued speaking with the pannikin in his hand, and his eyes
shut as if to get the picture of the schooner's position fair before his
mind's vision: "There was a quarter of a mile of ice beyond the ship: I
have it very plain in my sight: it was a great muddle of hillocks, for
the ice pressed thick and hard, and raised us and vomited up peaks and
rocks to the squeeze. Suppose I have been asleep a week?" Here he opened
his eyes and gazed at me.

"Well?" said I.

"I say," he continued in the tone of one easily excited into passion, "a
week. It will not have been more. It is impossible. Never mind about
your eighteen hundred and one," showing his fangs in a sarcastic grin;
"a week is long enough, friend. Then this is what I mean to say: that
the breaking away of a quarter of a mile of ice in a week is fine work,
full of grand promise: the next wrench--which might come now as I speak,
or to-morrow, or in a week--the next wrench may bring away the rock on
which we are lodged, and the rest is a matter of patience--which we can
afford, hey? for we are but two--there is plenty of meat and liquor and
the reward afterwards is a princely independence, Mr. Paul Rodney."

I was struck with the notion of the bed of ice on which the schooner lay
going afloat, and said, "Are sea and wind to be helped, think you? If
the block on which we lie could be detached, it might beat a bit against
its parent stock, but would not uni