Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/429

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rapidly, and its sea-margin was breaking up. The "Twins" had been loosened from their bonds and had floated away; and a crowd of icebergs, of forms that were strange to us, had come sailing out of the Sound in stately and solemn procession, wending their way to the warmer south—their crystals tumbling from them in fountains as they go.

Every thing about me gave warning that I had returned from the north in the nick of time.

McCormick had been at work as well on the inside as on the outside of the vessel. The temporary house had been removed from the upper deck, and the decks, and bulwarks, and cabins, and forecastle had been furbished up; and, after all this spring house-cleaning, the little schooner looked as neat and tidy as if she had never been besmeared with the soot and lamp-smoke of the long winter. The men were setting up the rigging; the bow-sprit, and jib-boom, and foretop-mast had been repaired; the yards had been sent aloft; the masts were being scraped down; and a little paint and tar fairly made our craft shine again. The sailors had moved from the hold to their natural quarters in the forecastle; and Dodge was busy getting off and stowing away the contents of the store-house, except such articles as I had proposed leaving behind, which were carefully deposited in a fissure of a rock, and covered over with heavy stones.

The Esquimaux still hung round us. Tcheitchenguak had set up a tent on the terrace, and had for a companion a new-comer, named Alatak, and for house-*keeper a woman, who appeared to have a roving commission, without special claim on anybody, and whom I had seen before at Booth Bay, where she figured