and left on a floe of ice in 79 deg. north latitude, the steamer going southward without attempting their relief.  Even in that moment of extremity he made an effort to secure the case containing his observations, but it was washed away from him by heavy seas.  For six months these nineteen human beings drifted on the mass of ice over the polar seas, through all the darkness and horrors of an Arctic winter, without fire except such as was made by burning one of their boats—­a feeble blaze daily, enough to warm a quart of water in which to soak their pemmican—­without shelter save such as the heaped ice and snow afforded, and on starvation diet.  After four months the floe began to melt so rapidly that it was but twenty yards wide.  “We dared not sleep,” says Sergeant Meyer, “fearing the ice would break under us and we should find our grave in the Arctic Sea.”  Several times the ice did break beneath them, and they were washed into the flood, but scrambled up again on the fast-melting floe.  During the whole of this time the signal-service soldier continued faithful to his work, taking such observations as were possible with the instruments left to him.  The boat had been burned long before, and they warmed their water with an Esquimaux lamp.  On April 22d their provisions consisted of but ten biscuits.  Starvation was before them when a bear was shot, and they lived on its raw meat for two weeks.  At the end of that time a steamer passed within sight.  The poor wretches on the ice hoisted a flag and shouted, but the vessel passed out of sight.  Another ship a few days later came within the horizon and disappeared.  The next day was foggy:  again a steamer was sighted, and for hours the shipwrecked crew strove to make themselves seen and heard through the fog, firing shots, hoisting their torn flag and shouting at the tops of their voices.  They were seen at last, and taken aboard the Tigress, “more like ghastly spectres who had come up through hell,” says one of the narrators, “than living men.”

The pay of the signal-service soldiers is small, and it is hardly to be supposed that they are all enthusiasts in science, or so in love with meteorology that they cheerfully brave danger and hardships such as these for its sake.  We must look for the secret of their loyalty to their steady, tedious work in that quiet devotion to duty which we find in the majority of honest men—­the feeling that they must go through with what they have once undertaken.  And, after all, the majority of men are honest, and loyalty to irksome work is so commonplace a matter that it is only when we see it carry a man steadily through great and sudden peril, or consider how in its great total the work of obscure individuals has lifted humanity to higher levels in the last three centuries, that we can understand how good a thing it is.

At some future time we shall ransack the lower floor of the little house on the beach and discover what is to be found there.