bed and bedding, such as he may see exhibited in the windows of furniture shops, with thick, white blankets, so delicate that in spite of their thickness they look as if they might float away of their own accord, so light and fine do they appear.  It was not blankets like these that Captain Pedersen gave us; we should not have known what to do with them if he had.  The blankets the commissariat gave us were of an entirely different sort.  As to their colour —­ well, I can only call it indeterminable —­ and they did not give one the impression that they would float away either, if one let go of them.  No, they would keep on the ground right enough; they were felted and pressed together into a thick, hard mass.  From the dawn of time they had served our brave warriors at sea, and it is by no means impossible that some of them had gruesome stories to tell of the days of Tordenskjold.  The first thing I did, on obtaining possession of these treasures, was to get them into the dyeing-vat.  They were unrecognizable when I got them back —­ in ultramarine blue, or whatever it was called.  The metamorphosis was complete:  their warlike past was wiped out.

My intention was to have these two hundred blankets made into Polar clothing, and I took counsel with myself how I might get this done.  To disclose the origin of the stuff would be an unfortunate policy.  No tailor in the world would make clothes out of old blankets, I was pretty sure of that.  I had to hit upon some stratagem.  I heard of a man who was a capable worker at his trade, and asked him to come and see me.  My office looked exactly like a woollen warehouse, with blankets everywhere.  The tailor arrived.  “Was that the stuff?” “Yes, that was it.  Just imported from abroad.  A great bargain.  A lot of samples dirt cheap.”  I had put on my most innocent and unconcerned expression.  I saw the tailor glance at me sideways; I suppose he thought the samples were rather large.  “A closely woven stuff,” said he, holding it up to the light.  “I could almost swear it was ‘felted.’ " We went carefully through every single sample, and took the number.  It was a long and tedious business, and I was glad when I saw that at last we were nearing the end.  Over in a corner there lay a few more; we had reached the one hundred and ninety-third, so there could not be many in the pile.  I was occupied with something else, and the tailor went through the remainder by himself.  I was just congratulating myself on the apparently fortunate result of the morning’s work when I was startled by an exclamation from the man in the corner.  It sounded like the bellow of a mad bull.  Alas! there stood the tailor enveloped in ultramarine, and swinging over his head a blanket, the couleur changeante of which left no doubt as to the origin of the “directly imported” goods.  With a look of thunder the man quitted me, and I sank in black despair.  I never saw him again.  The fact was that in my hurry I had forgotten the sample blanket that Captain Pedersen had sent me.  That was the cause of the catastrophe.