Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the great ice barrier. Last year he had given to two tall volcanoes the names of his ships, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_. This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to get shelter under the lee of an iceberg, but the _Terror_ rammed the _Erebus_ so that her bow-sprit, fore topmast and a lot of smaller spars were carried away, and she was jammed against the wall of the berg totally disabled. She could not make sail and had no room to wear round, so she sailed out backward, one of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then, clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her yard-arms almost scraping both of them, until she gained the smoother water to leeward, where she found her consort. * * * * * In Canada the British governor set up a friendship between the French Canadians and our government which has lasted ever since. That was on the eighth of September, but on the fifth another British dignitary sailed for home, having generously given a large slice of Canada to the United States. * * * * * In Hayti there was an earthquake, in Brazil a revolution; in Jamaica a storm on the tenth which wrecked H. M. S. _Spitfire_, and in the western states Mount Saint Helen’s gave a fine volcanic eruption. Northern Mexico was invaded by two filibustering expeditions from the republic of Texas, and both were captured by the Mexicans. There were eight hundred fifty prisoners, some murdered for fun, the rest marched through Mexico exposed to all sorts of cruelty and insult before they were lodged in pestilence-ridden jails. Captain Edwin Cameron and his people on the way to prison overpowered the escort and fled to the mountains, whence some of them escaped to Texas. But the leader and most of his men being captured, President Santa Ana arranged that they should draw from a bag of beans, those who got black beans to be shot. Cameron drew a white bean, but was shot all the same. One youth, G. B. Crittenden, drew a white bean, but gave it to a comrade saying, “You have a wife and children; I haven’t, and I can afford to risk another chance.” Again he drew white and lived to be a general in the great Civil War. General Green’s party escaped by tunneling their way out of the castle of Perot, but most of the prisoners perished in prison of hunger and disease. The British and American ministers at the City of Mexico won the release of the few who were left alive. * * * * *