She answered that some cooking had been done for the crew in this cabin.

'Pray sit you here,' said I, catching her gently by the wrist and bringing her close to the stove, and seating her on a small cleated sofa beside it. 'I believe a pannikin of hot drink—tea, coffee, or cocoa—and something to eat, will do us both good. Keep you here and thaw through and through whilst I get a kettleful of water.'

She was watching me with some life: the cuddy fire threw a warm, cheerful colour upon her face, and the flames shone in her eyes, filling them as with a dance of courage. When I spoke of fetching some fresh water, she cried out eagerly, extending her arms:

'Oh! mind you do not slide overboard. The decks are deadly. I can't be left alone again.'

I smiled and bade her not fear for me, and picking up the kettle and dropping the chopper into my coat pocket—it was an immensely thick pilot-cloth coat I had found in the captain's cabin and put on—I went on deck.

This was a lead-coloured day with a confusion of ragged black cloud thronging southward where the vapour was crowded and darkening into a look of thunder. I saw no signs of the 'Planter,' nothing but the ice afar. Secretly I had no hope that Captain Parry would persevere in his quest. I made no doubt he would suppose all hands in the jolly-boat had been drowned, which, God knows, was very near the truth; and this would dispirit him, his forecastle working strength would be weakened also, for, saving Wall, the 'Lady Emma's' men were of no use, and I reckoned he would be glad to stick his ship north, clear of the perils of the ice and the blinding snow-storms.

But whether it was because I was a young fellow of a heart naturally lively, or whether because I had escaped a dreadful death, so that the being on board this hull was almost as a rescue, 'tis true I felt no depression, no despondency in any marked degree when I looked round on stepping on deck and saw the leaden, rolling, frosting ocean bare, and viewed the tumbling, dismasted, mutilated hull, white fore and aft, bright with a hundred figures in ice, a most forlorn and dismal object as she bowed her naked bowsprit into the sallow trough, wearily leaning off the slant, with cataracts of foam hissing from the channels and scaling her sloping side. I could not but reflect that, though we were far south, whalers in plenty were to be met with in these seas, and that the hulk was stout and buoyant, and bade fair to last us our time in her, which might not extend beyond the morrow.

So, with a good heart and a vow besides to do my manhood's best to cheer up my poor companion, to make her as comfortable as the means of the hulk and my sailor's judgment would allow, and to help preserve her life in God's own time, I looked along the deck, and then seeing how it must be, went to a scuttlebutt lashed forwards of the port gangway, and finding it half full, went to work on it with the chopper, knocked the hoops off, and the staves tumbled to the deck, letting slip a mass of fresh-water ice, shaped cask-wise. I struck off as much as would fill a kettle, leaving the rest to lie, and returned to the cabin.

'Now,' said I, knowing the tonic worth of work in a time like this, 'melt this for us, if you please. When the kettle boils we'll go to breakfast.'