es, everything; and at the end of
five minutes there was nothing there but a little dust and some clear
ice.

"It's very wonderful!" the doctor said; "but it won't do. We must find
another, take him up carefully, and not thaw him out, but get him back
to Hull in his ice, like a glass case."

"Come back, lads; the Irishman's gone," I said; and they came back
slowly; and we had to set up the tent in a fresh place, and, while we
did it, the doctor found another body, and set us to work to get it out.

We got this one out capitally; the ice running like in a grain; and
after six hours' hard work, there lay the body, like an ornament in a
glass paper-weight, and the doctor was delighted.

About two hours after, as we were all sitting together in the tent, we
heard a sharp crack, and started; but the doctor said it was only the
ice splitting with the heat of the sun; and so it proved, for five
minutes after, in came a gaunt, weird-looking figure, with a strange
stare in his glimmering, grey eyes; a wild toss in his long yellow hair
and beard, both of which were dashed with patches of white, that looked
as though the colour had changed by damp or mildew, or the bitter,
searching cold. With such a dreamy, far-off gaze, he looked beyond the
men who sat opposite, that they turned involuntarily and glanced over
their shoulders, as though they expected to see something uncanny
peering at them from behind. His long limbs and wiry frame, together
with this strange, eerie expression, give him the air of some old viking
or marauding Jute come to life again, and ready to recite a Norse
_rune_, or to repeat a mystic _saga_ of the deep, impenetrable North.

"Eh," he said, "I was just thinkin' a bit aboot the time when I went wi'
Captain Parry to his expedition."

"Why, you weren't with Captain Parry?" said the doctor.

"It's aboot mysel' I meant to tel ye, if ye'll no' be so clever wi'
contradictin', and I say once more--(here he glowered into space, as
though he saw something a long way off)--I was thinking about a man I
met wi' in about eighty-two degrees o' latitude, when I was out wi'
Captain Parry on the third expedition of the _Hecla_, in 1827, at which
time I was no more than forty year old."

"Forty in 1827!" said the doctor. "Why, how old do you make yourself?"

"I'll no mak' _mysel'_ any age; but let us--no' to be particular to a
year or so--put me down at seventy-six or seventy-eight."

"Ho! ho! ho!" laughed Scud