"That's strange," said the doctor.
"Are you surprised?" asked the commander, laughing. "What! are we lucky enough to find anything that will surprise you?"
"I am surprised without being surprised," answered the doctor, smiling, "since the brig Ann Poole, of Greenspond, was caught in the ice in the year 1813, in the forty-fourth degree of north latitude, and Dayement, her captain, saw hundreds of icebergs."
"Good," said Shandon; "you can still teach us a great deal about them."
"O, not so very much!" answered Clawbonny, modestly, "except that ice has been seen in very much lower latitudes."
"That I know, my dear Doctor, for when I was a cabin-boy on the sloop-of-war, Fly—"
"In 1818," continued the doctor, "at the end of March, or it might have been the beginning of April, you passed between two large fields of floating ice, in latitude forty-two."
"That is too much!" exclaimed Shandon.
"But it's true; so I have no need to be surprised, now that we are two degrees farther north, at our sighting an iceberg."[*]
"You are bottled full of information, Doctor," answered the commander; "one needs only draw the cork."