"You're a strange fellow," said Tom Chester. "Who'd ever have thought of spending New Year's Day in that way?"
"A great many, I hope. Depend upon it. Tom, the best way to secure happiness yourself is to promote the happiness of others. I wouldn't exchange my investment for yours."
Dear reader, I have sketched two ways of spending the day that ushers in the New Year. Tom Chester spent his time and money in selfish gratification. Philip devoted his to nobler uses. Which do you prefer?
[PERILOUS OCCUPATIONS.]
Sealskins are a costly commodity, in more ways than one. More perilous than almost any other mentionable pursuit, seal-hunting is yearly exacting a greater penalty in human lives than it ever did before. Hunted for generations, the seals have become more wary, and year by year they retire farther and farther into the well-nigh inaccessible ice of the highest northern latitudes.
It is not sport, this hunting the seal from the icy, storm-swept coast of Newfoundland; it is toil, whereby in part the hardy Newfoundlander wins his scanty measure of bread, and the chase is beset with multitudinous and unforeseen perils.
The wind gathers the ice into floes, and jams it against the coast, an immeasurable, jagged expanse of it, interspersed with plains; then the Newfoundlander takes his gaff and his food and his goggles, and sets out from his little harbor, starting at midnight that he may come up with the pack at dawn. But the wind which sweeps in the ice inevitably sweeps it out again, without warning, in an hour, or a day, or a week; nor does it pause to consider the situation of the men who are twenty miles offshore. It veers and freshens, and drives the whole mass, grinding and heaving, far out to sea, where it disperses it into its separate fragments.
The lives of the hunters depend upon the watchfulness of the attenuated line of lookouts, from the women on the headland to the first sentinel within signaling distance. But tragedies occur notwithstanding. Some years ago of five sealing-schooners that penetrated the drift ice then blocking the northernmost extremity of Baffin's Bay one only returned. Two or three years previously, at Kedy, near Cape Voronoff, Siberia, three hundred Russian sealers, at work upon an ice-floe, were driven northward into the frozen ocean, owing to the sudden springing up of a southerly gale, and were never heard of again.
At St. Paul's Island, one of the Pribyloff group, off the coast of Alaska, are the graves of seventy odd sealers, found frozen stiff and stark on an ice-floe that drifted ashore one night.