to stay with the rest, and come home with the ship, if they could; if not, by sledges to Port Leopold, and so by a steam-launch which he had seen left there for Franklin in 1849.  But the arrival of Mr. Pim put an end to all these plans.  We have his long despatch to the Admiralty explaining them, finished only the day before Pim arrived.  It gives the history of his three years’ exile from the world,—­an exile crowded full of effective work,—­in a record which gives a noble picture of the man.  The Queen has made him Sir Robert Le Mesurier McClure since, in honor of his great discovery.

Banks Land, or Baring Island, the two names belong to the same island, on the shores of which McClure and his men had spent most of these two years or more, is an island on which they were first of civilized men to land.  For people who are not very particular, the measurement of it which we gave before, namely, that it is about the size and shape of Ireland, is precise enough.  There is high land in the interior probably, as the winds from in shore are cold.  The crew found coal and dwarf willow which they could burn; lemmings, ptarmigan, hares, reindeer, and musk-oxen, which they could eat.

    “Farewell to the land where I often have wended
    My way o’er its mountains and valleys of snow;
      Farewell to the rocks and the hills I’ve ascended,
    The bleak arctic homes of the buck and the doe;
      Farewell to the deep glens where oft has resounded
    The snow-bunting’s song, as she carolled her lay
      To hillside and plain, by the green sorrel bounded,
    Till struck by the blast of a cold winter’s day.”

There is a bit of description of Banks Land, from the anthology of that country, which, so far as we know, consists of two poems by a seaman named Nelson, one of Captain McClure’s crew.  The highest temperature ever observed on this “gem of the sea” was 53 deg. in midsummer.  The lowest was 65 deg. below zero in January, 1853; that day the thermometer did not rise to 60 deg. below, that month was never warmer than 16 deg. below, and the average of the month was 43 deg. below.  A pleasant climate to spend three years in!

One day for talk was all that could be allowed, after Mr. Pim’s amazing appearance.  On the 8th of April, he and his dogs, and Captain McClure and a party, were ready to return to our friend the “Resolute.”  They picked up Dr. Domville on the way; he had got the broken sledge mended, and killed five musk-oxen, against they came along.  He went on in the dog-sledge to tell the news, but McClure and his men kept pace with them; and he and Dr. Domville had the telling of the news together.