JACK MASON'S VISIT TO THE NORTH SEA.
If you should go a great way north, you would find it very cold. The further you go north, the colder it is. I went so far that way one time, that I got almost frozen. The ship I sailed in came close to an iceberg once, and we all thought for a while that the ship would strike the iceberg. If it had struck, it would have been broken all in pieces, and we should have been drowned or frozen, every one of us. God was kind and good to us, though. The wind was blowing very hard, and right toward the iceberg. But just as we had got almost up to it, the wind changed, and blew us away from it.
But I forgot that you do not know what an iceberg is. It is a great hill of ice. In the North Sea, these ice-hills are often as high as your church, and sometimes a great deal higher. These hills of ice are floating along the water there, and when it is foggy or dark, the sailors cannot always see them. So sometimes the ship strikes them, and is dashed to pieces. Sometimes it gets between two of these ice-hills, and gets crushed, as if it was a little boat. Then the men in the ship have to get out, and jump upon one of the ice-hills. But they are pretty likely to be frozen to death then.
THE INDIANS.
In that cold country I saw some Indians. They were dressed in skins. I never saw such dirty-looking men and women before in all my life, and I have never seen any such since. They had never seen a ship before, I should think. I thought they did not know much more than the white bears. Why, they would sell almost all the clothes they had on, if we would give them a few pieces of glass, or a nail or two. One of the women who came to the ship had a little girl about four years old, and she said she would give us that girl, if we would let her have a tin pan which she saw.
These Indians tie their children on their backs, when they have to walk a great way. They licked the oil on the outside of our lamps, just as a dog or a cat would have done. Oh, what dirty people! They eat their meat raw. We killed a seal one day, and our captain gave it to one of the young women. She took it, and bit it into pieces with her teeth. Then she passed it round to the rest of the Indians, and they all helped eat it.