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and Bonsall, who had stood out our severest marches, were seized with trembling-fits and short breath, and in spite of all my efforts to keep up an example of sound bearing I fainted twice on the snow.

as soon as we began to inove, and awoke [rect influence of the cold. Men like McGary now with unequivocal signs of mental disturbance. It became evident that he had lost the bearing of the icebergs, which in form and color endlessly repeated themselves, and the uniformity of the vast field of snow utterly forbade the hope of local landmarks.

Pushing ahead of the party and clambering over some rugged ice-piles, I came to a long level floe which I thought might probably have attracted the eyes of weary men in circumstances like our own. It was a light conjecture, but it was enough to turn the scale, for there was no other to balance it. I gave orders to abandon the sledge and disperse in search of footmarks. We raised our tent, placed our pemmican in cache, except a small allowance for each man to carry on his person, and poor Ohlsen, now just able to keep his legs, was liberated from his bag. The thermometer had fallen by this time to 49.3°, and the wind was setting in sharply from the north-west. It was out of the question to halt it required brisk exercise to keep us from freezing. I could not even melt ice for water, and at these teinperatures any resort to snow for the purpose of allaying thirst was followed by bloody lips and tongue: it burnt like. caustic.

It was indispensable, then, that we should move on, looking out for traces as we went. Yet when the men were ordered to spread themselves, so as to multiply the chances, though they all obeyed heartily, some painful impress of solitary danger, or perhaps it may have been the varying configuration of the ice-field, kept them closing up continually into a single group. The strange manner in which some of us were affected I now attribute as much to shattered nerves as to the di

We had been nearly eighteen hours out without water or food, when a new hope cheered us. I think it was Hans, our Esquimaux hunter, who thought he saw a broad sledge-track. The drift had nearly effaced it, and we were some of us doubtful at first whether it was not one of those accidental rifts which the gales make in the surface-snow. But as we traced it on to the deep snow among the hummocks we were led to footsteps, and, following these with religious care, we at last came in sight of a small American flag fluttering from a hummock, and lower down a little Masonic banner hanging from a tent-pole hardly above the drift. It was the camp of our disabled comrades: we reached it after an unbroken march of twenty-one hours.

The little tent was nearly covered. I was not among the first to come up; but when I reached the tent-curtain, the men were standing in silent file on each side of it. With more kindness and delicacy of feeling than is often supposed to belong to sailors, but which is almost characteristic, they intimated their wish that I should go in alone. As I crawled in, and, coming upon the darkness, heard before me the burst of welcome gladness that came from the four poor fellows stretched on their backs, and then for the first time the cheer outside, my weakness and my gratitude together almost overcame me: "They had expected me; they were sure I would come !"

We were now fifteen souls, the thermometer 75° below the freezing-point, and our sole accommodation a tent barely able to contain eight persons; more than half our party were obliged to keep from freezing by walking outside while the others slept. We could not halt long. Each of us took a turn of two hours' sleep, and we prepared for our homeward inarch.

We took with us nothing but the tent, furs to protect the rescued party and food for a journey of fifty hours; everything else was abandoned. Two large buffalobags, each made of four skins, were doubled up so as to form a sort of sack lined on each side by fur, closed at the bottom, but opened at the top. This was laid on the sledge, the tent, smoothly folded, serving as a floor. The sick, with their limbs sewed up carefully in reindeer-skins, were placed upon the bed of buffalo-robes in a half-reclining posture; other skins and blanket-bags were thrown above them, and the whole litter was lashed together so as to allow but a single opening opposite the mouth for breathing.

It took us no less It took us no less and refresh them,

This necessary work cost us a great deal of time and effort, but it was essential to the lives of the sufferers. than four hours to strip and then to embale them in the manner I have described. Few of us escaped without frost-bitten fingers. The thermometer was at 55.6° below zero, and a slight wind added to the severity of the cold. It was completed at last, however; all hands stood round, and after repeating a short prayer we set out on our retreat. It was fortunate indeed that we were not inexperienced in sledging over the ice. A great part of

our track lay among a succession of hummocks, some of them extending in long lines fifteen and twenty feet high, and so uniformly steep that we had to turn them by a considerable deviation from our direct course; others that we forced our way through far above our heads in height, lying in parallel ridges, with the space between too narrow for the sledge to be lowered into it safely, and yet not wide enough for the runners to cross without the aid of ropes to stay them. These spaces, too, were generally choked with light snow, hiding the openings between the ice-fragments. They were fearful traps to disengage a limb from, for every man knew that a fracture, or a sprain even, would cost him his life. Besides all this, the sledge was top-heavy with its load: the maimed men could not bear to be lashed down tight enough to secure them against. falling off.

Notwithstanding our caution in rejecting every superfluous burden, the weight, including bags and tents, was eleven hundred pounds.

And yet our march for the first six hours was very cheering. We made by vigorous pulls and lifts nearly a mile an hour, and reached the new floes before we were absolutely weary. lutely weary. Our sledge sustained the trial admirably. Ohlsen, restored by hope, walked steadily at the leading-belt of the sledge-lines, and I began to feel certain of reaching our halfway station of the day before where we had left our tent. But we were still nine miles from it, when, almost without premonition, we all became aware of an alarining failure of our energies. I was, of course, familiar with the benumbed and almost lethargic sensation of extreme cold; and once, when exposed for some hours in the mid

winter of Baffin's Bay, I had experienced symptoms which I compared to the diffused paralysis of the electro-galvanic shock. But I had treated the sleepy comfort of freezing as something like the embellishment of romance. I had evidence now to the contrary.

Bonsall and Morton, two of our stoutest men, came to me begging permission to sleep: "They were not cold; the wind did not enter them now; a little sleep was all they wanted." Presently, Hans was found nearly stiff under a drift, and Thomas, bolt upright, had his eyes closed and could hardly articulate. At last John Blake threw himself on the snow and refused to rise. They did not complain of feeling cold, but it was in vain that I wrestled, boxed, ran, argued, jeered or reprimanded: an immediate halt could not be avoided.

We pitched our tent with much difficulty. Our hands were too powerless to strike a fire; we were obliged to do without water or food. Even the spirits (whiskey) had frozen at the men's feet, under all the coverings. We put Bonsall, Ohlsen, Thomas and Hans, with the other sick men, well inside the tent, and crowded in as many others as we could; then, leaving the party in charge of Mr. McGary, with orders to come on after four hours' rest, I pushed ahead with William Godfrey, who volunteered to be my companion. My aim was My aim was to reach the halfway tent and thaw some ice and pemmican before the others arrived. The floe was of level ice and the walking excellent. I cannot tell how long it took us to make the nine miles, for we were in a strange sort of stupor and had little apprehension of time. It was prob

ably about four hours. We kept ourselves awake by imposing on each other a continued articulation of words; they must have been incoherent enough. I recall these hours as among the most wretched I have ever gone through; we were neither of us in our right senses, and retained a very confused recollection of what preceded our arrival at the tent. We both of us, however, remember a bear who walked leisurely before us and tore up, as he went, a jumper that Mr. McGary had improvidently thrown off the day before. He tore it into shreds and rolled it into a ball, but never offered to interfere with our progress. I remember this, and with it a confused sentiment that our tent and buffalo-robes might probably share the same fate. Godfrey had a better eye than myself, and, looking some miles ahead, he could see that our tent was undergoing the same unceremonious treatment. I thought I saw it too, but we were so drunken with cold that we strode on steadily, and, for aught I know, without quickening our pace.

Probably our approach saved the contents of the tent; for when we reached it, the tent was uninjured, though the bear had overturned it, tossing the buffalo-robes and pemmican into the snow. We missed only a couple of blanket-bags. What we recollect, however-and perhaps all we recollect is that we had great difficulty in raising it. We crawled into our reindeer sleeping-bags without speaking, and for the next three hours slept on in a dreamy but intense slumber. When I awoke, my long beard was a mass of ice, frozen fast to the buffaloskin; Godfrey had to cut me out with his jack-knife. Four days after our escape I

found my woollen comfortable with a goodly share of my beard still adhering to it.

We were able to melt water and get some soup cooked before the rest of our party arrived; it took them but five hours to walk the nine miles. They were doing well, and, considering the circumstances, in wonderful spirits. The day was, most providentially, windless, with a clear sun. All enjoyed the refreshment we had got ready; the crippled were repacked in their robes, and we sped briskly toward the hummock-ridges which lay between us and the Pinnacly Berg.

The huminocks we had now to meet came properly under the designation of "squeezed ice." A great chain of bergs stretching from north-west to south-east, moving with the tides, had compressed the surface-floes, and, rearing them up on their edges, produced an area more like the volcanic pedragal of the basin of Mexico than anything else I can compare it to. It required desperate efforts to work our way over it-literally desperate, for our strength failed us anew and we began to lose our self-control. We could not abstain any longer from eating snow; our mouths swelled, and some of us became speechless. Happily, the day was warmed by a clear sunshine, and the thermometer rose to 4° in the shade; otherwise, we must have frozen.

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Our halts multiplied, and we fell, half sleeping, on the snow; I could not prevent it. Strange to say, it refreshed us. I ventured upon the experiment myself, making Riley wake me at the end of three minutes, and I felt so much benefited by it that I timed the men in the same way. They sat on the runners of the sledge, fell asleep instantly, and were

forced to wakefulness when their three minutes were out.

By eight in the evening we emerged from the floes. The sight of the Pinnacly Berg revived us. Brandy-an invaluable resource in emergency—had already been served out in tablespoonful doses. We now took a longer rest and a last but stouter dram, and reached the brig at 1 P. M.-we believe, without a halt.

I say we believe, and here, perhaps, is the most decided proof of our sufferings: we were quite delirious and had ceased to entertain a sane apprehension of the circumstances about us. We moved on like men in a dream. Our footmarks, seen afterward, showed that we had steered a bee-line for the brig. It must have been must have been by a sort of instinct, for it. left no impress on the memory. Bonsall was sent staggering ahead, and reached the brig God knows how, for he had fallen repeatedly at the track-lines; but he delivered with punctilious accuracy the messages I had sent by him to Dr. Hayes. I thought myself the soundest of all, for I went through all the formula of sanity, and can recall the muttering delirium of my comrades when we got back into the cabin of our brig. Yet I have been told since of some speeches—and some orders, too-of mine which I should have remembered for their absurdity if my mind had retained its balance.

Petersen and Whipple came out to meet us about two miles from the brig. They brought my dog-team, with the restoratives I had sent for by Bonsall. I do not remember their coming. Dr. Hayes entered with judicious energy upon the treatment our condition called for, administering morphine freely, after the usual frictions. He reported

none of our brain-symptoms as serious, referring them properly to the class of those indications of exhausted power which yield to generous diet and rest. Mr. Ohlsen suffered some time from strabismus and blindness; two others underwent amputation of parts of the foot without unpleasant consequences, and two died in spite of all our efforts.

This rescue-party had been out for seventytwo hours. We had halted in all eight hours, half of our number sleeping at a time. We travelled between eighty and ninety miles, most of the way dragging a heavy sledge. The mean temperature of the whole time, including the warmest hours of three days, was at minus 41.2°. We had no water except at our two halts, and were at no time able to intermit vigorous exercise without freezing.

ELISHA KENT KANE.

THE LIFE OF TERENCE.

PUBLIUS TERENTIUS AFER was

born at Carthage, and was a slave of Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, who, perceiving him to have an excellent understanding and a great deal of wit, not only bestowed on him a liberal education, but gave him his freedom in a very early part of his life.

Our poet was beloved and much esteemed by noblemen of the first rank in the Roman commonwealth, and lived in a state of great intimacy with Scipio Africanus and C. Lælius. He wrote six comedies. When he offered his first play, which was The Andrian, to the ædiles, he was ordered to read it to Acilius, one of the ædiles, the year of

the exhibition of that play. When he arrived at that poet's house, he found him at table; and it is said that our author, being very meanly dressed, was suffered to read the opening of his play seated on a very low stool near the couch of Acilius, but scarce had he repeated a few lines than Acilius invited him to sit down to supper with him; after which, Terence proceeded with his play, and finished it to the no small admiration of Acilius. His six plays were equally admired by the Romans.

To wipe off the aspersion of plagiarism, or, perhaps, to make himself a master of the customs and manners of the Grecians, in order to delineate them the better in his writings, he left Rome in the thirty-fifth year of his age, after having exhibited the six comedies which are now extant; and he never returned Volcatius speaks of his death in the

more.

following manner:

But Terence, having given the town six plays,
Voyaged for Asia; but when once embarked,
Was ne'er seen afterward. He died at sea."

He is said to have been of middle stature, genteel and of a swarthy complexion. He left a daughter, who was afterward married to a Roman knight; and at the time of his death he was possessed of an house, together with a garden containing six acres of land, on the Appian Way, close by the Villa Martis. C. Cæsar speaks of Terence thus:

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