s in a high state of polish.

Across the angle of the wall, to the left of the door, and behind it
when it opened, three hammocks were slung, one above another. No one
slept in the uppermost.

But the feature of the hut was its fireplace; and this was merely a
square hearth-stone, raised slightly above the floor, in the middle of
the room. Upon it, and upon a growing mountain of soft grey ash, the
fire burned always. It had no chimney, and so the men lost none of its
warmth. The smoke ascended steadily and spread itself under the
blackened beams and roof-boards in dense blue layers. But about
eighteen inches beneath the spring of the roof there ran a line of small
trap-doors with sliding panels, to admit the cold air, and below these
the room was almost clear of smoke. A newcomer's eyes might have
smarted, but these men stitched their clothes and read in comfort.
To keep the up-draught steady they had plugged every chink and crevice
in the match-boarding below the trap-doors with moss, and payed the
seams with pitch. The fire they fed from a stack of drift and wreck
wood piled to the right of the door, and fuel for the fetching strewed
the frozen beach outside--whole trees notched into lengths by lumberers'
axes and washed thither from they knew not what continent. But the
wreck-wood came from their own ship, the _J. R. MacNeill_, which had
brought them from Dundee.

They were Alexander Williamson, of Dundee, better known as The Gaffer;
David Faed, also of Dundee; George Lashman, of Cardiff; Long Ede, of
Hayle, in Cornwall; Charles Silchester, otherwise The Snipe, of Ratcliff
Highway or thereabouts; and Daniel Cooney, shipped at Tromso six weeks
before the wreck, an Irish-American by birth and of no known address.

The Gaffer reclined in his bunk, reading by the light of a smoky and
evil-smelling lamp. He had been mate of the _J. R. MacNeill_, and was
now captain as well as patriarch of the party. He possessed three
books--the Bible, Milton's "Paradise Lost," and an odd volume of
"The Turkish Spy." Just now he was reading "The Turkish Spy."
The lamplight glinted on the rim of his spectacles and on the silvery
hairs in his beard, the slack of which he had tucked under the edge of
his blanket. His lips moved as he read, and now and then he broke off
to glance mildly at Faed and the Snipe, who were busy beside the fire
with a greasy pack of cards; or to listen to the peevish grumbling of
Lashman in the bunk