n's earnest
assurance that there was nothing in the box except a few meteorological
instruments. How the Captain translated to the Eskimos the word
meteorological we have never been able to ascertain. His own
explanation is that he did it in a roundabout manner which they failed
to comprehend, and which he himself could not elucidate.

On the way up the hill, Alf made several interesting discoveries of
plants which were quite new to him.

"Ho! stop, I say, uncle," he exclaimed for the twentieth time that day,
as he picked up some object of interest.

"What now, lad?" said the Captain, stopping and wiping his heated brow.

"Here is another specimen of these petrifactions--look!"

"He means a vegetable o' some sort turned to stone, Chingatok,"
explained the Captain, as he examined the specimen with an interested
though unscientific eye.

"You remember, uncle, the explanation I gave you some time ago," said
the enthusiastic Alf, "about Professor Heer of Zurich, who came to the
conclusion that primeval forests once existed in these now treeless
Arctic regions, from the fossils of oak, elm, pine, and maple leaves
discovered there. Well, I found a fossil of a plane leaf the other
day,--not a very good one, to be sure--and now, here is a splendid
specimen of a petrified oak-leaf. Don't you trace it quite plainly?"

"Well, lad," returned the Captain, frowning at the specimen, "I do
believe you're right. There does seem to be the mark of a leaf there,
and there is some ground for your theory that this land may have been
once covered with trees, though it's hard to believe that when we look
at it."

"An evidence, uncle, that we should not be too ready to judge by
appearances," said Alf, as they resumed their upward march.

The top gained, a space was quickly selected and cleared, and a simple
hut of flat stones begun, while the Captain unpacked his box. It
contained a barometer, a maximum and minimum self-registering
thermometer, wet and dry bulb, also a black bulb thermometer, a
one-eighth-inch rain-gauge, and several other instruments.

"I have another box of similar instruments, Alf, down below," said the
Captain, as he laid them carefully out, "and I hope, by comparing the
results obtained up here with those obtained at the level of the sea, to
carry home a series of notes which will be of considerable value to
science."

When the Captain had finished laying them out, the Eskimos retired to a
little distan