“Well, Binny,” said Abram slowly, after overhearing these words, “I don’t want my faculties suspended; that’s all I’ve got to say!”
The next day we were working our way through great canals of clear water, that meandered among the pack ice. There were great headlands on each side, covered with ice and snow, and the solitude seemed to grow awful, but the doctor kept us all busy. Now it was a seal hunt; then we were all off after a bear. Once or twice we had a reindeer hunt, and supplied the ship with fresh meat. Bird shooting, too, and fishing had their turn, so that it was quite a pleasure trip when the difficulties of the navigation left us free.
Eighty degrees had long been passed, and still our progress was not stayed. We often had a bit of a nip from the ice closing in, and over and over again we had to turn back; but we soon found open water again, after steaming gently along the edge of the track, and thence northward once more, till one day the doctor and I took observations, and we found that we were eighty-five degrees north, somewhere about a hundred miles farther than any one had been before.
“We shall do it, Cookson!” cried the doctor, rubbing his hands. “Only five more degrees, my lad, and we have made our fame! Cookson, my boy, you’ll be knighted!”
“I hope not, sir!” I said, shuddering, as I thought of the City aldermen. “I would rather be mourned!”
“That’s a bad habit, trying to make jokes,” he said, gravely. “Fancy, my good fellow, making a pun in eighty-five degrees north latitude! but I’m not surprised. There is no latitude observed now, since burlesques have come into fashion. Where are you going, Cookson!”
“Up in the crow’s-nest, sir,” I said. “I don’t like the look of the hummocky ice out nor’ard.”
I climbed up, spy-glass in hand, when, to my horror, the doctor began to follow me.
“That there crow’s-nest won’t abear you, sir!” cried Scudds, coming to the rescue.
“Think not, my man?” said the doctor.