The nearer we drew to the glacier the closer packed became the water with the floating bergs; they threatened the ship now on every side, and so slowly did we move we hardly seemed advancing.  The bergs flashed and shone as they passed us, rayed through with jewel-like colours, and on one gliding by far from the ship’s side I saw two seals at play.  For many hundred miles past these seals were the only living things I had seen.  The forests on the shore, so thick in the first part of the journey by the Alaskan coast, had long since given way to barren rocks, snow-capped peaks, and ice-filled clefts.  No life seemed possible there, the wide distant blue above had shown no bird nor shadow of bird passing.  There was no voice of insect nor the least of Nature’s children here.  Between the thunderous crash of the ice-falls that seemed to shiver the golden air there was intense and solemn stillness.

But the seals played merrily on their floating berg as they passed me, and I watched them long through field-glasses as the joyous, turbulent blue waves carried them far out of my sight towards the open sea.

The clanging of the breakfast bell made me leave my place and go down for a hurried breakfast.  I was chilled through, for the early morning air is keen, the pure breath of infinite snowfields, and I took my coffee gratefully amongst the crowd of hungry passengers.

Rough miners some of them, going up to Sitka from the great Treadwell mine at Juneau, traders on their way to Fort Wrangle, and some few explorers.  Amongst them were four men our boat had taken on board as we passed the mouth of the Stickeen river.  They had started from Canada, lured by the light of the gold that lay under the snows of the Klondike, intending to travel there overland.  Losing their way, they had wandered with their pack train for eighteen months in these vast solitudes of ice and snow, groping blindly towards the coast.

Food had failed them, their horses had died by the way from want or fatigue.  Faced by starvation, the men had eaten those of their pack animals that had survived, then, finally, when hope had almost left them, they came in sight of the sea.

They were talking of this and their terrible conflict with snow-storm and ice-floe as I joined them, of the plans for making money with which they had started and their failure.

I got away from them all and went back to my place as soon as I could, and spent the rest of the morning as I had begun it, alone at the forward end.

There were very few passengers like myself.  Not many people for mere pleasure would take that hazardous voyage along the coast, for it was new country and not a tenth of the sunken rocks and dangerous shoals were yet on any chart.  All the way up along that rocky and treacherous shore we had seen the evidences of wreck and disaster everywhere.  Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy