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144 it; but as it then blew too hard to venture through it in the night, they pitched their tents. A little before daylight, they were moving again. Leaving a written memorandum of their proceedings in a cairn of stones, as they had done on other occasions, they embarked once more, and were happy in finding that the weather had become calm. Holding on their way till noon, they reached the edge of the packed ice, where they found that its extremity was but a mile to the northward. Happily, a southern breeze springing up at the same moment, enabled them to round it; when finding the water open they renewed their efforts, and reached the eastern shore of the strait that afternoon. All the circumstances of their journey had been singularly propitious. It is probable that during all the years they had been imprisoned in those regions, there had not before been a time when it would have been possible to do what they had now finally accomplished in a few days. "Accustomed as we were to the ice," says Ross's noble and pathetic narrative, "to its caprices, and to its sudden and unexpected alternations, it was a change like that of magic to find that solid mass of ocean which was but too fresh in our memories—which we had looked at for so many years, as if it was fixed for ever in repose which nothing could hereafter disturb, suddenly converted into water; navigable, and navigable to us, who had almost forgotten what it was to float at freedom on the seas. It was at times scarcely to be believed: and he who dozed to awake again, had for a moment to renew the conviction that he was a seaman on his own element, that his boat once more rose on the waves beneath him, and that when the winds blew, it obeyed his will and his hand."