lace. Captain, give the men a piece of brandy each."

"A little brandy apiece, you mean, sir."

"No," he said coolly; "I mean a piece of brandy each."

He was quite right: the brandy was one solid mass, like a great
cairngorm pebble, and we had to break it with an axe; and very delicious
the bits were to suck, but as to strength, it seemed to have none.

We had an accident that evening, and broke one of the doctor's
thermometers, the ball of quicksilver falling heavily on the ice, and,
when I picked it up, it was like a leaden bullet, quite hard, so that we
fired it at a bear, which came near us; but it only quickened his steps.

In spite of the tremendous cold, we none of us seemed much the worse,
and joined the doctor in his hunt for curiosities. There was land here
as well as ice, although it was covered; for there was on one side of
the hollow quite a hill, and the doctor pointed out to me the trace of
what he said had been a river, evidently emptying itself into the great
crater; but when he pulled out the compass to see in which direction the
river must have run, the needle pointed all sorts of ways, ending by
dipping down, and remaining motionless.

We were not long in finding that animal life had at one time existed
here; for, on hunting among the blocks of ice, we found several in which
we could trace curious-looking beasts, frozen in like fossils.

We had set up our tent under the lee of a great rock of ice, on the edge
of the crater, which looked so smooth and so easy of ascent, that it was
with the greatest difficulty that we could keep the doctor's nephew from
trying a slide down. He had, in fact, got hold of a smooth piece of ice
to use as a sledge, when the doctor stopped him, and put an end to his
enthusiasm by pointing down and asking him what was below in the
distance, where the hollow grew deep and dark, and a strange mist hung
over it like a cloud.

"If you go down, Alfred, my boy, you will never get back. Think of my
misery in such a case, knowing that you have, perhaps, penetrated the
mystery of the North Pole, and that it will never be known!"

The young fellow sighed at this arrest of his project.

Just then we were roused by a shout from Scudds, whom we could see in
the distance, standing like a bear on its hind legs, and moving his
hands.

We all set off to him, under the impression that he had found the Pole;
but he was only standing pointing to a great slab of transparent ice,