and he kept on laughing till
his pipe went out; and, while he laughed, he said, "Why, to be sure,
they frightened us!"

"Tit for tat," exclaimed William; "you frightened them,--that's fair."

"That's so," replied the Captain,--"that's so, sure enough; only they
wouldn't stay frightened, while we did, you see."

"What! did they find you out?"

"That they did, my lad, just as soon as they had finished the old
narwhal. We were sound asleep when they came; and they soon woke us up
with the great noise they made close to the hut.

"But stop a bit!" exclaimed the Captain, reflectively; "my story's got
ahead of me, or I've got ahead of the story,--one or the other; so I
must go back a little,"--and he paused, not with his finger to his nose
this time, as usual, but to his forehead, as if feeling in his brain for
the end of the "yarn," as he always called the story.

In a moment the old man appeared to have quite satisfied himself about
the matter, for he started off as fast as he could go:--

"I didn't tell you anything about the fort we built, nor the time we had
provisioning it,--did I?" said he.

"No," answered William, "nothing about a fort."

"Then there's the broken end of the yarn at last," and the old man took
his finger from his forehead and stopped feeling for it.

* * * * *

"Well, it was a good long time," continued the Captain, "before the
bears finished the old narwhal; but, finding how much they were occupied
in that quarter, we went to our storehouses, and brought all our stores
away, and stowed them close to the mouth of the hut, thinking that, if
they were discovered, we should there be better able to protect them.

"First of all, however, we built up two solid snow-walls, about three
feet apart, and as high as our heads, directly on a line with the
entrance to our hut, so that when we went outside we walked right
between them. Then, behind these walls, we piled all the birds,
seal-flesh and eggs that we had for food, and all the blubber (now
frozen quite hard) that we had for fuel,--the former on the right-hand
side (going out), and the latter on the left. Having done this, we
covered the whole over with snow several feet deep; and, as a still
further protection against our enemies the bears, we built up a great
wall all around in front of the hut where there were no high rocks.
Through this wall we left only one small hole to crawl through when we
went