On the other hand, some of Jack Frost's work is of the minutest and most delicate sort. With what exquisite patterns in ice he adorns the glass of our windows in winter! All that fine tracery is made up of tiny crystals, the lines and angles of which are more exact than a jeweller could cut them on a gem. Every snow-flake is a mass of such crystals, of many forms, yet all variations of one pattern. Let the flakes fall upon a piece of dark cloth, and you can sometimes see with the naked eye that they are regular six-pointed stars, but with a common magnifying-glass you can examine them much better. All ice is composed of these crystals closely packed together; and if a sunbeam is allowed to shine through a piece of it, the melting of the crystals makes the interior look as if it were studded with lovely little transparent flowers with six petals. In Russia a palace was once built of ice, and all the furniture and decorations were of the same material. It was very wonderful and very beautiful, but not so wonderful or so beautiful as the natural structure of the ice itself.
The change from water to ice is a familiar one to us, but to the ignorant natives of the tropics it seems almost like a miracle. It is only within a few years that ice has been imported into these tropical countries, and at first it was as great a curiosity as solid mercury or quicksilver would be here. This liquid metal, which is used in thermometers, does not freeze in our country, except very rarely in the coldest weather of the extreme north; but in the arctic regions this often occurs, and the solid mercury can be hammered and wrought like silver. Spoons might be made of it, but they would instantly melt if put into ice-cold water.
A FORECASTLE YARN.
HOW A SAILOR RODE WITH THE CZAR.
A FORECASTLE YARN.
BY DAVID KER.
"The queerest scrape as ever I got into," said old Jack Hawkins, "was when I was quite a young chap, makin' my fourth voyage to Rooshia. That's a queer place, mates, if you like! and the lingo's as queer as the country. I'd larned to talk it a bit by the time I'm tellin' on, for one of our crew was a Rooshian, and I picked it up from him. But I tell ye, 'twas as tough a job as shapin' yer course in a fog, with no sun to take a hobservation by. When you want to say 'Thank you,' you've got to sing out 'Blackguard are you,' which don't sound purlite nohow. Then they call a speech a 'wretch,' and a visitor a 'ghost' (the last sort o' visitor I should like), and instead of 'Indeed!' they say 'Sam Daly'; and some o' their own names are things like 'Comb-his-hair-off,' and 'Blow-my-nose-off.'[2]