NANSEN'S ENDURANCE.
Dr. Nansen seems to have been born and bred for arctic exploration. The strength and hardihood which were his by birth were developed and confirmed by the robust austerity of his early training. One reads of his habit of swimming in the evening in the coldest pools of the Frogner River that ran by the door of his father's house, and is no less astonished at the story of his plunge in the sea in pursuit of his kayaks in the extreme north, and of his endurance of the various cold baths he got in fights with bears and walruses. The man who put his wet and frozen foot-coverings in his bosom to thaw out and dry at night while he slept with his companion in a bag was an extraordinarily tough person, with an astonishing physique hardened by Spartan exercises. In his teens, he says, he used to go off on lonely expeditions in the great Frogner woods, and be gone alone for weeks at a time. "I disliked," he says, "to have any equipment for my expeditions. I managed with a crust of bread, and broiled my fish on the embers. I loved to live like Robinson Crusoe there in the wilderness."