“I don’t seem to remember anything specially interesting about the bears or the foxes.” His far-off look gave the little boy a sudden feeling of being abandoned by his one friend. He stood it for a moment, and then suddenly twisted his lithe body round and buried his face in the crook of the arm that clutched the chair back. Mar raised his eyes and seemed to come home from some vast journey. “Something curious did happen to a man I knew up there,” he said, in that friendly tone Jack knew so well. “A fellow who was knocking round the Russian Redoubt at St. Michaels, with the rest of the Scientific Corps, waiting for the revenue cutter that was to take us back to San Francisco. We got pretty tired waiting—” “Pwickers in your feet?” Jack interrupted, suddenly. Mar stopped short, for although Jack had uncovered his face to listen he was engaged in making the most surprising grimaces. “I’ve got awful pwickers myself,” he said. “Prickers?” “Yes. Oh, oh, my foot’s full of champagne.” Gingerly, and with further contortions of countenance, he stretched the cramped foot out. “Champagne?” Mar had echoed. “What do you know about champagne?” “Once—papa’s birfday. Oh, oh, my foot’s full of it!” “If it’s gone to sleep you’d better stamp,” recommended his friend gravely, and Jack applied the remedy with apparent relief after the first awful shock. He stood cautiously twisting about to restore circulation while Mar went on: “Yes, we got pretty tired hanging round St. Michaels, and one day two of the party took a boat and went off to an island to get birds’ eggs. While they were out a storm came up. An awful storm,” he assured his inattentive listener, but Jack was still gloomily twirling about, trying his numb foot, and not taking any stock apparently in a story that didn’t boast a bear in it, or even a white— “I never in my life saw anything like it,” Mar went on. “The gale churned up the sediment of Norton Sound into a boiling, yellow froth. The sleet gave up trying to come down, and took to shooting horizontally, as straight as a charge of musketry, and wherever it hit bare flesh—” He shook his shaggy head at the memory. “_I_ wouldn’t mind a little fing like vat!” said Jack, loftily. “Well,”—Mar accepted the implied criticism with meekness,—“what they minded most was that they couldn’t steer a course. It was going to be great luck if the boat lived at all in such a sea. She was driven north first. Neither one of the men knew just where it was they’d got to, but any kind of land was a pretty good sight. They were almost as glad to get near it as they were to get away from it.” “Why didn’t vey like it?” Jack didn’t so much as pause in his twirling to inquire. “Well, it wasn’t a very pretty place for landing purposes.” “Ho!” said the young gentleman with careless superiority, “I don’t mind where _I_ land! One time I landed wight on top of a earfquake!”