it specially thick, medium, and quite light.  It took a long time to get these skin clothes prepared.  First the reindeer-skins had to be bought in a raw state, and this was done for me by Mr. Zappfe at Tromso, Karasjok, and Kaatokeino.  Let me take the opportunity of thanking this man for the many and great services he has rendered me, not only during my preparations for the third voyage of the Fram, but in the fitting out of the Gjoa expedition as well.  With his help I have succeeded in obtaining things that I should otherwise never have been able to get.  He shrank from no amount of work, but went on till he had found what I wanted.  This time he procured nearly two hundred and fifty good reindeer-skins, dressed by the Lapps, and sent them to Christiania.  Here I had great trouble in finding a man who could sew skins, but at last I found one.  We then went to work to make clothes after the pattern of the Netchelli Eskimo, and the sewing went on early and late —­ thick anoraks and thin ones, heavy breeches and light, winter stockings and summer stockings.  We also had a dozen thin sleeping-bags, which I thought of using inside the big thick ones if the cold should be too severe.  Everything was finished, but not until the last moment.  The outer sleeping-bags were made by Mr. Brandt, furrier, of Bergen, and they were so excellent, both in material and making-up, that no one in the world could have done better; it was a model piece of work.  To save this outer sleeping-bag, we had it provided with a cover of the lightest canvas, which was a good deal longer than the bag itself.  It was easy to tie the end of the cover together like the mouth of the sack, and this kept the snow out of the bag during the day’s march.  In this way we always kept ourselves free from the annoyance of drifting snow.  We attached great importance to having the bags made of the very best sort of skin, and took care that the thin skin of the belly was removed.  I have seen sleeping-bags of the finest reindeer-skin spoilt in a comparatively short time if they contained a few patches of this thin skin, as of course the cold penetrates more easily through the thin skin, and gives rise to dampness in the form of rime on meeting the warmth of the body.  These thin patches remain damp whenever one is in the bag, and in a short time they lose their hair.  The damp spreads, like decay in wood, and continually attacks the surrounding skin, with the result that one fine day you find yourself with a hairless sleeping-bag.  One cannot be too careful in the choice of skins.  For the sake of economy, the makers of reindeer-skin sleeping-bags are in the habit of sewing them in such a way that the direction of the hair is towards the opening of the bag.  Of course this suits the shape of the skins best, but it does not suit the man who is going to use the bag.  For it is no easy matter to crawl into a sleeping-bag which is only just wide enough to allow one to get in, and if the way of the hair is against one it is doubly difficult.  I had them all made as one-man bags, with lacing round the neck; this did not, of course, meet with the approval of all, as will be seen later.  The upper part of this thick sleeping-bag was made of thinner reindeer-skin, so that we might be able to tie it closely round the neck; the thick skin will not draw so well and fit so closely as the thin.