ves by
jumping out on the ice, and were all successful in reaching other
vessels, having managed to save their boats before their ships actually
went down. It was a very fearful sight, the crushing up of these
vessels,--as if they were nothing more than eggshells in the hand.

"This storm lasted, with occasional interruptions, thirteen days, but
the breaks in it were of such short duration that we had little
opportunity to 'fish' (as seal-catching is called) any more. We
approached the ice several times, only to be driven off again before we
had fairly succeeded in getting to work, and hence we caught very few
seals.

"By the time the storm was over the season for seal-fishing was nearly
over too; so we had no alternative, if we would get a good cargo of oil,
but to go in search of whales, which would take us still farther north,
and into much heavier ice, and therefore, necessarily, into even greater
danger than we had hitherto encountered. Accordingly, the course of the
vessel was changed, and I found that we were steering almost due north,
avoiding the ice as much as possible, but passing a great deal of it
every day. The wind being mostly fair, and the ice not thick enough at
any time to obstruct our passage, we hauled in our latitude very fast."

"Excuse me, Captain Hardy," here interrupted William, "what is hauling
in latitude?"

"That's for going farther north," answered the Captain. "Latitude is
distance from the equator, either north or south, and what a sailor
makes in northing or southing he calls 'hauling in his latitude,' just
as making easting or westing is 'hauling in his longitude.'"

"Thank you, Captain," said William, politely, when he had finished.

"Is it all clear now?" inquired the Captain.

"Yes," said William, "clear as mud."

"Clear as mud, eh! Well, that isn't as clear as the pea-soup was they
used to give us on board the _Blackbird_, for that was so clear that, if
the ocean had been made of it, you might have seen through it all the
way down to the bottom; indeed, one of the old sailors said that it
wasn't soup at all. 'If dat is soup,' growled he, 'den I's sailed forty
tousand mile trough soup,'--which is the number of miles he was supposed
to have sailed in his various voyages.

"But no matter for the soup. The days wore on none the less that the
soup was thin, and still we kept going on and on,--getting farther and
farther north, and into more and more ice. Sometimes our course wa