"But, Heaven be praised! a
whaler fetched off the survivor. It was then that he got the bad fever
though, so maybe he dreamt the worst."
I felt great sympathy with Pat's evident disrelish for this tale, but
the oldest and hairiest sailor seemed hardly to regard it as worth
calling an adventure. If you wanted to see ice that was ice, you should
try the coast of Greenland, he said. "Hartic Hexploration for choice,
but seals or blubber took you pretty far up. He remembered the
Christmas he lost _them two_." (And cocking one leg over the other, he
drew a worsted sock from his foot, and displayed the fact that his great
toe and the one next to it were gone.) "They lost more than toes that
time too. You might believe it gave you a lonelyish kind of feel when
there was no more to be done for the ship but get as much firewood out
of her timber as you could, and all you had in the way of a home was
huts on an ice-floe, and a white fox, with a black tip to its tail, for
a pet. It wouldn't have lasted long, except for discipline," we young
'uns might take notice.
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