were spoken between the watches as they shifted; the wheel was relieved, the mate took his place on the quarter-deck, the lookouts in the bows; and each man had his narrow space to walk fore and aft in, or rather to swing himself forward and back in, from one belaying-pin to another, for the decks were too slippery with ice and water to allow of much walking.  To make a walk, which is absolutely necessary to pass away the time, one of us hit upon the expedient of sanding the decks; and afterwards, whenever the rain was not so violent as to wash it off, the weather-side of the quarter-deck, and a part of the waist and forecastle were sprinkled with the sand which we had on board for holystoning, and thus we made a good promenade, where we walked fore and aft, two and two, hour after hour, in our long, dull, and comfortless watches.  The bells seemed to be an hour or two apart, instead of half an hour, and an age to elapse before the welcome sound of eight bells.  The sole object was to make the time pass on.  Any change was sought for which would break the monotony of the time; and even the two hours’ trick at the wheel, which came round to us in turn, once in every other watch, was looked upon as a relief.  The never-failing resource of long yarns, which eke out many a watch, seemed to have failed us now; for we had been so long together that we had heard each other’s stories told over and over again till we had them by heart; each one knew the whole history of each of the others, and we were fairly and literally talked out.  Singing and joking we were in no humor for; and, in fact, any sound of mirth or laughter would have struck strangely upon our ears, and would not have been tolerated any more than whistling or a wind instrument.  The last resort, that of speculating upon the future, seemed now to fail us; for our discouraging situation, and the danger we were really in (as we expected every day to find ourselves drifted back among the ice), ``clapped a stopper’’ upon all that.  From saying ``when we get home,’’ we began insensibly to alter it to ``if we get home,’’ and at last the subject was dropped by a tacit consent.

In this state of things, a new light was struck out, and a new field opened, by a change in the watch.  One of our watch was laid up for two or three days by a bad hand (for in cold weather the least cut or bruise ripens into a sore), and his place was supplied by the carpenter.  This was a windfall, and there was a contest who should have the carpenter to walk with him.  As ``Chips’’ was a man of some little education, and he and I had had a good deal of intercourse with each other, he fell in with me in my walk.  He was a Fin, but spoke English well, and gave me long accounts of his country,—­ the customs, the trade, the towns, what little he knew of the government (I found he was no friend of Russia), his voyages, his first arrival in America, his marriage and courtship; he had married a countrywoman of his, a dress-maker, whom he met with in Boston.  I had very little to tell him of my quiet, sedentary life at home; and in spite of our best efforts, which had protracted these yarns through five or six watches, we fairly talked each other out, and I turned him over to another man in the watch, and put myself upon my own resources.