the North Pole was only a half a mile off.

How it was they got to their present location,

I’m sure I don’t know, and it’s not my vocation

To give the details of their quick locomotion.

Electricity may have done it, or steam;

Page 46.

But motive powers are not my theme.

My heroes were there, near the frozen ocean.

The man had too much of “cold without,”

And the lady sighed for her tippet and muff;

For though they had come by a summary route,

The weather, they found, was wintry enough.

When they climbed an iceberg’s loftiest height,

To the imminent danger of dresses and hoops,

Of ribbons and pins, and laces and loops,

The Grinnell Expedition was in sight.

Now the lady had been prepared to preach,

Or rather, to make a nice serious speech;

But it might as well have been written in Dutch for her,

For the wind and the weather, conspiring together,

Turned out to be, altogether too much for her;

One half she forgot, and she bungled the rest of it,

Though I finally managed to pick out the best of it.

She asked her companion, who stood in the lee of her,

For the wind spread her skirts to the bigness of three of her,

“Who sent these ships to the rescue of those,

Who have perilled their lives in these Northern snows?

Did he spring from the mob, the benevolent ‘masses,’

Or from the detestable ‘upper classes’?”

With a great deal more to the same effect,

Which I couldn’t exactly make out the sense of,

For I know that her sentences “failed to connect;”

And I suppose that her chattering teeth bit the ends off;

But ’twas very conclusive, whatever she said.

He never disputed her; never said nay,

But only hung down his discomfited head;

And whatever he thought, he had Nothing to Say.

Chilled to the heart with the terrible cold,

Both to get back were most truly-solicitous,

Never before was the saying old,

“As cold as charity,” half so felicitous.

They hastened back to Broadway, when she said,

That one more journey that night she’d lead him,

Before she’d let him go home to bed.

And he, not caring to quibble or question,

At once fell in with the lady’s suggestion,

Not thinking she’d “one more” lecture to read him.

This time they took a course rectilinear

Southward, and landed in Norfolk, Virginia.

Pestilence there was doing its worst,

Hundreds were dying, and hundreds were dead.

Many who should have been bravest, the first

Had deserted their trust, and shamelessly fled.

But men from the