ened before, frequently. To say
truth, at every point of land we turn, I feel a sort of expectation,
amounting almost to certainty, that we shall find your father and his
party travelling southward on their way to the Danish settlements."

"Perhaps you are right. God grant that it may be so!"

As he spoke they reached the fixed ice which ran along the foot of the
precipices for some distance, like a road of hard white marble. Many
large rocks lay scattered over it, some of them several tons in weight,
and one or two balanced in a very remarkable way on the edge of the
cliffs.

"There's a curious-looking gull I should like to shoot," exclaimed Fred,
pointing to a bird that hovered over his head, and throwing forward the
muzzle of his gun.

"Fire away, then," said his friend, stepping back a pace.

Fred, being unaccustomed to the use of firearms, took a wavering aim and
fired.

"What a bother! I've missed it!"

"Try again," remarked Tom with a quiet smile, as the whole cliff vomited
forth an innumerable host of birds, whose cries were perfectly
deafening.

"It's my opinion," said Fred with a comical grin, "that if I shut my
eyes and point upwards I can't help hitting something; but I
particularly want yon fellow, because he's beautifully marked. Ah! I
see him sitting on a rock yonder, so here goes once more."

Fred now proceeded towards the coveted bird in the fashion that is known
by the name of _stalking_--that is, creeping as close up to your game as
possible, so as to get a good shot; and it said much for his patience
and his future success, the careful manner in which, on this occasion,
he wound himself in and out among the rocks and blocks of ice on the
shore in the hope of obtaining that sea-gull. At last he succeeded in
getting to within about fifteen yards of it, and then, resting his
musket on a lump of ice, and taking an aim so long and steadily that his
companion began to fancy he must have gone to sleep, he fired, and blew
the gull to atoms! There was scarcely so much as a shred of it to be
found.

Fred bore his disappointment and discomfiture manfully. He formed a
resolution then and there to become a good shot, and although he did not
succeed exactly in becoming so that day, he nevertheless managed to put
several fine specimens of gulls and an auk into his bag. The last bird
amused him much, being a creature with a dumpy little body and a beak of
preposterously large size and comical