e that. It must be that some vessel is near us, or there is a
crew of wrecked sealers around us on the ice. Ah, Peter, are you
thinking of getting up. Listen to those sounds, and tell us what they
are--will you?"

Peter listened gravely and attentively.

"I not know that noise, brother. I know nearly all the cries of bird and
beast, and often I sleep all 'lone in the woods; hear howl, hear fox,
hear frog, hear everyting. Sometime I tink I know that noise; then I
tink I not know him at all. Get La Salle awake; ask him--he know."

La Salle slept but lightly whenever there was need of vigil, and the
last words had fallen on his awakening ears.

"What's the matter, Peter?" said he.

"We hear many strange noise. I not know, George not know, Regnie not
know, none of us know. There it come again. What you call that?"

La Salle listened a moment, went to the door, and then beckoned to his
companions to follow. The rain fell heavily, but the wind came warm and
gently from the balmy south, and no rude blast shrieked and sighed amid
the ice-peaks. The strange sounds were sweeter, louder, and apparently
nearer than before. Soft and sad as the strains of the disconsolate
Necker, plaintive as the mournings of men without hope, wild as the
cries of the midnight forest, and the sighings of wind-tossed branches.
La Salle laughed a low, glad laugh.

"You may sleep soundly," said he; "the coots and ducks have come
northward, and the spring is here at last. To-morrow will bring us
sport to repletion, for the sounds you hear are the love-songs of the
sea-birds, whose voices, however harsh, grow sweet when the sun brings
back again the season of love and flowers."

When the morn came, unheralded by sunbeams, and shrouded by leaden
rain-clouds, a veil of mist covered the vast ice-field, of which no two
masses retained their former proximity. A network of narrow channels
opened and closed continually among the dripping bergs, from whose sides
flashed the frequent cascade, and glimmered the shimmering avalanche of
dislodged snow. Amid this ever-shifting panorama, giving it life and
beauty, covering pool and channel with merry, restless knots of diving,
feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice
with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged
coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat,
lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling
the air wi