g it in two as I meant, it came down whole, and literally fell
into powder.

"I say, don't do that!" said a thick voice, and there, to our utter
astonishment, sat among the broken ice, a heavy-looking, Dutch-built
sailor, staring round, and yawning. "I'd have got up, if you had called
me," he continued, "without all that row."

"How did you get there?" said the doctor.

"There? Where?" said the Dutchman.

"In that block of ice," said the doctor.

"Stuff about your block of ice," said the Dutchman. "I lay down to
sleep last night on the snow, while our lads were trying for seal, off
Greenland. But I'll tell you all about it. Haven't seen them, I
suppose?"

"No," said Bostock, winking at us, "we haven't."

"They'll be here directly, I dare say, when they miss me," said the
Dutchman.

"I say, matey," said Binny Scudds, "we've 'bout lost our reckoning.
What's to-day?"

"To-day," said the Dutchman; "to-day's the twenty-fourth of July,
eighteen hundred and forty-two."

"Thank you, my man," said the doctor. "But perhaps you'll tell us whom
you are."

"Certainly," said the Dutchman; "but keep a look-out for my mates," and
he began.

CHAPTER SIX.

THE DUTCH SAILOR'S YARN.

As for my name, it is Daal, Van Daal; and if there be any of my kinsfolk
going about saying that they have the right to put a "Van" before their
name, and that they come of the Van Daals, who were a great family in
the seventeenth century, and one of whom was boatswain of Admiral Van
Tromp's flag-ship, all I can answer is that they say the thing that is
not; and that people who say such things deserve to be beaten by the
beadle all up and down the United Provinces. When I was a little boy,
and went to school to the Reverend Pastor Slagkop, there was a boy named
Vries--Lucas Vries--who did nothing but eat gingerbread and tell lies.
Well, what became of him? He was hanged before he was thirty--hanged at
the yard-arm of a Dutch seventy-four at Batavia for piracy, mutiny, and
murder: to which shameful end he had clearly been brought by eating
gingerbread and telling fibs. Mind this, you little Dutch boys, and
keep your tongues between your teeth and your stuyvers in your pockets,
when you pass the cake shops, if you wish to escape the fate of Lucas
Vries.

And yet I dare say that--ah! so many years ago--I was as fond of
gingerbread as most yunkers of my age, and that I did not always tell
the strict truth either to my parents at