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On recovering, I found myself in the cabin of the Leda, with Captain Hartly hanging over me, and chafing my hands and temples, in anxiety and solicitude, with hartshorn and vinegar; for being a kind-hearted fellow, he was seriously alarmed.

In these friendly offices he was ably assisted by Cuffy Snowball, his black cook, who burned several grey goose-quills under my nose, and who brought me a rummer full of brandy-punch steaming hot from the galley. On swallowing this, which they forced me to do at two draughts, I became considerably revived and invigorated.

"Why did you leave me there, Hartly—it might have been, to die?" I asked, reproachfully.

"I did not leave you, my dear boy, at least not a moment longer than we could help," he replied. "It cost us no small trouble to get clear of that lubberly barque. I wish the Black Schooner had sunk her, when athwart her hawse! We had to clap on all hands to warping into the fairway, and once there, we had to keep constantly forging a-head, as other craft were crowding into the channel astern of us."

"Then I was pretty near being left till the wharf-keeper came next morning. My heaven! I should have been stiff enough by that time!"

"I sent Paul Reeves and Hans Peterkin to bring off the cask on a sledge, and you may imagine the fright we were in on finding you cramped up and lifeless as a pickled herring!"

"Oh, Hartly," said I, "the torture I endured was frightful! I now repent of my undertaking, and wish myself back again."

"Repent—bah! It has been a stupidly managed job, but it is over now, and there is an end of it. Take another sip of the hot brandy-and-water, and come on deck; we are abreast of the Crow's Nest now, and in ten minutes more will be in blue water; then hurrah for the ice-fields!"

I followed him on deck, and found that we were, as he said, abreast of a high sugar-loaf shaped rock, crowned by a little battery named the Crow's Nest, and that around us a very exciting scene was passing.

The Leda was now in the fairway, or main channel, which was formed through the ice in the centre of the harbour, and into which there were cut more than fifty canals, or connecting links, along which the sealing ships were being warped from the various wharves at which they had been fitted out. All were gaily decked with their owners' private colours, and had their courses, or lower sails, cast loose, and were accompanied by crowds, who were conversing, laughing, and expressing their hopes of a successful fishery to the crews, whose voices rang cheerily as they tripped round the capstan or wrenched at the windlass, till they came abreast of the kedge anchor which was wedged in the ice; and then it was torn up, and carried off a-head towards the Narrows. when the cheering, warping, and tripping began anew.

Thousands of persons, many of them on skates, covered all the glassy expanse of the frozen harbour, which from some points of view appears land-locked, so closely do the mountains of rock converge at its entrance; and hundreds of sledges (Mr. Uriah Skrew's among the number), with round Russian bells at their horses' collars, or on the circular iron rod above their ears, with the drivers muffled in furs, swept to and fro; while bands of music playing the air invariable on this occasion, "St. Patrick's Day," marched alongside of the departing fleet.

Flags of every fashion—square, triangular, and swallow-tailed—were streaming everywhere; on the mastheads of the shipping, on the black-tarred mercantile stores, and on the dwellings of their owners—a passion for a display of bunting being one of the peculiarities of this our most northern colony in America.

The aspect of its capital, which covers the northern slope of the harbour, is rather pretty, though the country beyond is nearly as wild and as dreary as when, in the words of Hakluyt—"in the yeere of our Lord 1497, John Cabot a Venetian, and his son Sebastian, with an English fleet from Bristol, discovered that land which no man had before attempted, on 24th June, about five of the clocke, early in the morning. That island which lieth out before the land, he called of St. John, as I think, because it was discovered upon the day of John the Baptist."

During the brief summer, this harbour, the entrance of which is so narrow that two ships can scarcely pass in the dangerously deep mid-channel, is smooth as a mill-pond, and presents a lively scene, for there the smart Clyde-built clipper, the dark and battered Sunderland collier brig, the smart Yankee liner, with her gaudy stars and stripes, her snowy decks, and gear so taut; the Pomeranian, with her grass-green hull and fur-capped crew; the Dutch galliot, all brown varnish, and shaped like a half cheese, or like the old craft that bore the Crusaders to Palestine; the huge ship of Blackwall, redolent of guano, all blistered, rusted, and turned yellow by the sun of the fiery south; the sharp Spanish brig, which had run her cargo of slaves in South Carolina and escaped here, to go quietly home, with her brass nines hidden in the hold, and with fish in Lent for the pious at Cadiz or Oporto—during the brief season of summer, I say, all these had been here; but now when a snowy mantle covered the land, and black ice locked the harbour, its basin or bosom presented a very different scene.

Floundering through sludge and water, a thousand of those men who are England's real pioneers in the Far West—Irish emigrants—in long boots, were cutting the thick ice with ponderous saws, and pushing the blocks under the solid mass on either side, to form a fairway or clear channel for the shipping; and this channel, though at least twenty feet broad, would certainly be frozen hard and fast ere morning dawned.

On this occasion there passed out with us, as I have elsewhere stated, more than one hundred sail of sealing craft. There were brigs, brigantines, and schooners, ranging from fifty to two hundred and fifty tons, all following each other through the fairway, warping ahead, till beyond the Chain Rock, where they got into open water.

Many of the smaller craft are miserably adapted for the dangers they have to encounter, and thus are frequently crushed or lost in the ice by being swept off among the floes and fields to the far north, from whence they never return. Some, I have observed, had only a box lined with fire-brick placed on edge, lashed aft the foremast, for a caboose, and an iron cauldron on three legs placed therein for boiling the wretched mess of old salt pork and doughballs which form the daily food of the crew, who, with such apparatus, would be unable to cook anything in foul weather or a heavy sea.

The wind was southerly for a time, but gradually veered a little to the west as we neared the harbour mouth. After passing the Chain Rock, where a cable of Cyclopean aspect, that now lies a mass of rust thereon, was wont in times of war and alarm to be stretched across to the Pancake Rock to secure the harbour at night, we found ourselves in the deep water. With a loud cheer we brought the kedge anchor and hawser on board. Paul Reeves took the wheel; we sheeted home the foresail and gib, let fall the fore and main topsails, and brought the starboard tacks on board when we were clear of the Signal Hill, and the Dead Man's Bay—a dreary inlet of the sea—lay on our quarter.

This hill is a stern and precipitous mountain of sandstone and slate-rock, nearly six hundred feet in height, with batteries that rise over each other in tiers, to the highest, which is named "The Queen's." Opposite, towers an equally abrupt mountain of similar height and aspect, having at its base a little promontory defended by Fort Amherst.

The slender gut between is named the Narrows of St. John.

The breeze came more and more round upon our quarter as we ran past Signal Hill, ploughing through a somewhat heavy surf; past the Sugar Loaf, and a little creek where, in the clear summer sea, I have seen the guns of an ancient and forgotten wreck lying like black dots on the smooth white sand many fathoms below; for in these regions, when a brilliant sun shines upon the ocean, its waters become transparent to a wondrous depth; thus giant corals, dusky weeds, and the snow-white bones of mighty fish,

"With the rainbow hues of the sea-trees' bloom,"

may be seen distinctly at the depth of a hundred and fifty feet from the surface.

There, too, I have seen the bright yellow sea anemone, with its long fibrous leaves, that close and shrink into the rocks from view when touched.

Cape St. Francis, one of the eastern promontories of Avalon, was soon upon our beam; Cape Spear light had sunk into the waves astern, and night was coming down upon the wintry sea, when we hauled up a point or two to the north and west, and stood right away to the icy regions of the North; and that night merrily at supper we sang in the cabin—

"'Twas in the year of 'sixty-one,

Of March the seventeenth day,

That our gallant ship her anchor weighed

And to the North seas bore away,

Brave boys," &c.