of close hair, so that he can take a siesta on an iceberg without the least inconvenience.  Talking of siestas, by the way, the walrus is sometimes “caught napping.”  Occasionally, when the weather is intensely cold, the hole through which he crawls upon the ice gets frozen over so solidly that, on waking, he finds it beyond even his enormous power to break it.  In this extremity there is no alternative but to go to sleep again, and—­die! which he does as comfortably as he can.  The Polar bears, however, are quick to smell him out, and assembling round his carcass for a feast, they dispose of him, body and bones, without ceremony.

As it was impossible to drag this unwieldy animal to the ship that night, for the days had now shortened very considerably, the hunters hauled it towards the land, and having reached the secure ice, prepared to encamp for the night under the lee of a small iceberg.

CHAPTER XII.

A dangerous sleep interrupted—­A night in a snow-hut, and an unpleasant visitor—­Snowed up.

“Now, then,” cried Fred, as they drew up on a level portion of the ice-floe, where the snow on its surface was so hard that the runners of the sledge scarce made an impression on it, “let us to work, lads, and get the tarpaulins spread.  We shall have to sleep to-night under star-spangled bed-curtains.”

“Troth,” said O’Riley, gazing round towards the land, where the distant cliffs loomed black and heavy in the fading light, and out upon the floes and hummocks, where the frost-smoke from pools of open water on the horizon circled round the pinnacles of the icebergs—­“troth, it’s a cowld place intirely to go to wan’s bed in, but that fat-faced Exqueemaw seems to be settin’ about it quite coolly; so here goes!”

“It would be difficult to set about it otherwise than coolly with the thermometer forty-five below zero,” remarked Fred, beating his hands together, and stamping his feet, while the breath issued from his mouth like dense clouds of steam, and fringed the edges of his hood and the breast of his jumper with hoar-frost.

“It’s quite purty, it is,” remarked O’Riley, in reference to this wreath of hoar-frost, which covered the upper parts of each of them; “it’s jist like the ermine that kings and queens wear, so I’m towld, and it’s chaper a long way.”

“I don’t know that,” said Joseph West.  “It has cost us a rough voyage and a winter in the Arctic Regions, if it doesn’t cost us more yet, to put that ermine fringe on our jumpers.  I can make nothing of this knot; try what you can do with it, messmate, will you?”

“Sorra wan o’ me’ll try it,” cried O’Riley, suddenly leaping up and swinging both arms violently against his shoulders; “I’ve got two hands, I have, but niver a finger on them—­leastwise I feel none, though it is some small degrae o’ comfort to see them.”

“My toes are much in the same condition,” said West, stamping vigorously until he brought back the circulation.