ck coat of woolly
fur,--but a few had attained their third week of existence, and wore
their close-laid fur, whose silvery, sword-like fibres, when wet, lie
flat and smooth as glass.

Among the smaller fry were many adult animals, both male and female--the
latter being generally engaged in suckling their young.

The landing of the hunters was the signal for a general stampede, and
the monotonous whining of the "white-coats" was almost lost in the deep
barking of the mothers, and the hoarse roars of the large males.

The floe on which the young seals lay was a thick field of ice, whose
clear, greenish sides showed that it was the product of some Greenland
glacier. Years ago, when first detached from the ice-river of some
tortuous fiord, it had perhaps measured its depth in hundreds of yards;
and even now, judging from its height above the surface of the
sea,--about eight feet on the average,--it must have drawn nearly eight
fathoms of water.

The party had landed on a kind of sloping beach, probably worn by the
action of the sun, and what is even more destructive, the wash of the
sea-waves, and ascending found that the floe was nearly level for an
area of at least half a square mile, forming a kind of ice-meadow,
surrounded on three sides by sloping hills twenty feet higher. In the
sheltered valley thus formed lay at least a thousand seals, old and
young, of several species, and all ages.

There were, here and there, pairs of the small Greenland seal (_Phoca
Vitulina_), weighing from forty to sixty pounds, and marked on the back
with beautiful mottlings of black, shaded down to the silvery white of
its spotless breast. These, when disturbed near the edge of the floe,
slid noiselessly into the water, going down tail foremost into the
depths. Most plentiful of all were the "springing seals," (_Phoca
Hispida_),--known sometimes from its markings as "the harp,"--less
beautiful in form, and with hair of a dusky yellow on the under side.
These, when near the slope, sprang headlong into the water, and, diving
with a splash, came up in shoals, darting forward with a springing
motion, and emerging and disappearing much like a shoal of porpoises.

Larger, coarser, and with crested heads, long bristles, and harsher
hair, the "bearded seal" (_Phoca Barbata_),--the noblest quarry of the
Newfoundland sealer, who always speaks of him as "the old hood
sile,"--crawled with uncouth but rapid shuffling motions to the brink,
and with