her—a gentleman who entered into conversation with me about the cold regions of the north generally, and of the escapes of ships from icebergs in particular.

He was a seafaring man. I could see that at a glance, although he was not one I should have thought who had donned her majesty’s uniform, for he lacked that dapper look that the blue-jackets of the service are usually distinguished by; but he was a veritable old salt, or “shell-back,” none the less, sniffing of the ocean all over, and having his face seamed with those little venous streaks of pink (as if he indulged in a dab of rouge on the sly occasionally) which variegate the tanned countenances of men exposed to all the rigours of the elements, and who encounter with an equal mind the freezing blast of the frozen sea or the blazing sun of Africa.

I told this worthy that once, when on a voyage in one of the Inman line of steamers from Halifax to Liverpool, I had gone—or rather the vessel had, to be more correct—perilously near an iceberg, when my nautical friend proceeded to give vent to his own exposition of the “glacial theory,” saying that a lot of nonsense was written about the ice in the Arctic regions by people who never went beyond their own firesides at home and had never seen an iceberg. It made him mad, he said, to read it!

“I daresay you’ve read a lot of rubbish on the subject?” said the old gentleman, getting excited about the matter, as if he only wanted a good start to be off and away on his hobby.

“I daresay I have,” I replied.

“Well, what with all the fiction that has been written and the fabulous stories told of the Arctic and its belongings, the ‘green hand’ who makes the voyage for the first time is full of expectations concerning all the wonderful sights he’s going to see in ‘the perennial realms of ice and snow’—that’s the phrase the newspaper chaps always use—expectations which are bound to be disappointed,—and why?”

“I’m sure I can’t tell!” said I.

“Because the things that he fancies he’s going to see don’t really exist, nor never yet did in spite of what book-learned people may say! The voyager who goes north for the first time is bound, let us say for illustration, for Baffin’s Bay; and, from what he has learnt beforehand, bears and walruses, seals and sea-lions, whale blubber and the Esquimaux who eat it, all occupy some considerable share of his imagination. But, above all these, the first thing that he looks forward to see are the icebergs, or floating mountains of ice, which are so especially the creation of the cold regions to which he is sailing. These icebergs, sir, form the staple background of every Arctic view, without which none would be deemed for a moment complete. Their gigantic peaks and jagged precipices are familiar to most, in a score of pictures and engravings drawn by artists who were never beyond the Lizard Lights; and really, I believe that if one was sketched that wasn’t at least a thousand feet high or more, and didn’t have a polar bear perched on top and a full rigged ship sailing right underneath it, why, the generality of people would think it wasn’t a bit like the real thing!”

“And what is the ‘real thing’ like?” I asked with some curiosity.

“There you have me,” said the old sailor, who had from his speech evidently received a good education; and if once “before the mast” had now certainly risen to something much higher. “To men whose minds have been wrought up to such a pitch of fancy and expectation, the first sight of a real iceberg is a complete take-down to their imagination. Your ship is pitching about, say, in the cross seas near the mouth of Davis Strait, preparatory to entering within the smooth water of the Arctic circle, when in the far distance your eye catches sight of a lump of ice, looking, as it rises and falls sluggishly in the trough of the sea, not unlike a hencoop covered with snow, after it had been pitched overboard by some passing ship, or like a gigantic lump of foam tossed on the crest of a wave. If the day is sunless, the reflection of light which gives it that glistening appearance, so remarkable as the midnight sun glances among an array of these objects, is wanting to add dignity to the contour of what it is a rude dissipation of life’s young dream to learn is an iceberg—though on a very small scale. It is simply a wave-worn straggler from the fleet which will soon be met sailing southward out of the Greenland fjords. The warm waters of the Atlantic will in the course of a few days be too much for it. The sun will be at work on it; it will get undermined by the wash of the breakers, until, being top-heavy, it will speedily capsize. Then the war between the ice and the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will become the ‘bergy bit,’ as whalers call the slowly-lessening mass of crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but only to rise again in the form of vapour, which the cold of the north will convert into snow, the parent of that inland ice about the polar regions which forms the source of subsequent icebergs afresh—the process being always going on, never ending!”

“Why, you are quite a philosopher,” I observed.

“A bit of a one, sir,” said the old gentleman with a smile. “Those who go down to the sea in ships, you know, see wonders in the deep! But, to continue what I was telling you about the icebergs. As your ship proceeds further north they become more numerous and of larger dimensions, until, as you pass the entrance of some of those great fjords, or inlets, which intersect the Greenland coast-line, they pour out in such numbers that the wary mariner is thankful for the continuous daylight and summer seas that enable him so easily to avoid these floating rocks. Here are several broken-up ones floating about in the Waigat, a narrow strait between the island of Disco and the mainland of Greenland, and in close vicinity to several fjords noted for sending big bergs adrift in the channel way to float southward. These are the ‘ice-mountains’ of the fancy artist. One ashore close into the land, and yet not stranded or on account of its depth in the water getting into any very shallow soundings, you may see in your mind’s eye, as I’ve seen them scores of times in reality. It presents to your notice a dull white mass of untransparent ice—not transparent, with objects to be seen through it on the other side, as I have noticed in more than one picture of the North Pole taken by an artist on the spot! This mass is generally jagged at the top with saw-like edges, and it doesn’t so very much resemble those Gothic cathedral spires as Arctic writers try to make out. Still, on the whole, the shape of this monster floating mass of ice is very striking to those seeing it for the first time; and when you come to look at it more closely, its size and general character lose nothing by having the details ciphered down, as a Yankee skipper would say.”

“Are the icebergs very big?” I inquired.

“Well,” said the old gentleman, quite pleased at being asked for information on the subject, and evidently wishing to convert me to his own practical way of thinking in opposition to Arctic fiction-mongers, “they may sometimes be seen of a hundred and fifty feet high, occasionally reaching to a couple of hundred, while sometimes I’ve seen an iceberg that towered up more than double that height; but the majority of them do not exceed a hundred feet at most. The colour, as I’ve said, is not emerald green, as most folks think—that is, not unless it is seen under what science-folks call the prismatic action of light—but a dull white that is almost opaque. The sides are, generally, dripping with the little streams of water formed by the melting of the ice, and glistening in the rays of the sun; but a dull white is the principal colour of the mass. Its base is broader than its summit, and is here and there hollowed into little caverns by the action of