nove, and with no more reverence than a boy would show
in throwing a stone at a jackass, tumbled him into the chasm. He then
stepped up to the body of the Portuguese boatswain, dragged him to the
same fissure, and rolled him into it.

"There!" cried he; "now they are properly buried."

And with this he went coolly on with his work.

I said nothing, but was secretly heartily disgusted with this brutal
disposal of his miserable shipmates' remains. However, it was his doing,
not mine; and I confess the removal of those silent witnesses was a very
great relief to me, albeit when I considered how Tassard had been
awakened, and how both the mate and the boatswain might have been
brought to by treatment, I felt as though, after a manner, the Frenchman
had committed a murder by burying them so.

It blew a small breeze all day from the south-west, the weather keeping
fine. It was ten o'clock in the morning when we started on our labour,
and the sun had been sunk a few minutes by the time we had rigged the
last whip for the lowering and poising of the powder. This left us
nothing to do in the morning but light the matches, lower the powder
into position, and then withdraw to the schooner and await the issue.
Our arrangements comprised, first, four barrels of powder in deep yawns
ahead of the vessel, directly athwart the line of her head; second, two
barrels, a wide space between them, in the great chasm on the starboard
side; third, about fifty very heavy charges in bags and the like for the
further rupturing of many splits and crevices on the larboard bow of the
ship, where the ice was most compact. What should follow the mighty
blast no mortal being could have foretold. I had no fear of the charges
injuring the vessel--that is to say, I did not fear that the actual
explosion would damage her: but as the effect of the bursting of such a
mass of powder as we designed to explode upon so brittle a substance as
ice was not calculable, it was quite likely that the vast discharge,
instead of loosening and freeing the bed of ice, might rend it into
blocks, and leave the schooner still stranded and lying in some wild
posture amid the ruins.

But the powder was our only trumps; we had but to play it and leave the
rest to fortune.

We got our supper and sat smoking and discussing our situation and
chances. Tassard was tired, and this and our contemplation of the
probabilities of the morrow sobered his mind, and he talked with a
cer