DRAGGING A SEAL.
Here is a picture of the interior of one of the igloes, or snow-huts:—
“Joe and Hannah are sitting in front of the lamp, playing checkers on an old piece of canvas, the squares being marked out with Tyson’s pencil. They use buttons for men, as they have nothing better. The natives easily learn any sort of game; some of them can even play a respectable game of chess; and cards they understand as well as the ‘heathen Chinee.’ Cards go wherever sailors go, and the first lessons that the natives of any uncivilized country get are usually from sailors.
“Little Puney, Joe and Hannah’s adopted child, a little girl, is sitting wrapped in a musk-ox skin; every few minutes she says to her mother, ‘I am so hungry!’ The children often cry with hunger. It makes one’s heart ache, but they are obliged to bear it with the rest.”
The gale continued on the 2nd, with blinding showers of snow—fine, penetrating, pungent. Next day the weather moderated, and the glass rose to 15° below zero. Dark clouds lowered in the horizon, preventing the land from being seen, if any shore were near. But the rapid rise in the temperature, after so strong a north-west gale, allowed Tyson to hope that the wind had mastered the current, and was forcing them towards the Greenland shore.
RETURN OF THE SUN.