"Sunday, September 23d. It was a year yesterday since we made fast for the first time to the great hummock in the ice. Hansen improved the occasion by making a chart of our drift for the year. It does not look so very bad, though the distance is not great; the direction is almost exactly what I had expected. But more of this to-morrow; it is so late that I cannot write about it now. The nights are turning darker and darker; winter is settling down upon us. "Tuesday, September 25th. I have been looking more carefully at the calculation of our last year's drift. If we reckon from the place where we were shut in on the 22d of September last year to our position on the 22d of September this year, the distance we have drifted is 189 miles, equal to 3° 9' latitude. Reckoning from the same place, but to the farthest north point we reached in summer (July 16th), makes the drift 225 miles, or 3° 46'. But if we reckon from our most southern point in the autumn of last year (November 7th) to our most northern point this summer, then the drift is 305 miles, or 5° 5'. We got fully 4° north, from 77° 43' to 81° 53'. To give the course of the drift is a difficult task in these latitudes, as there is a perceptible deviation of the compass with every degree of longitude as one passes east or west; the change, of course, given in degrees will be almost exactly the same as the number of degrees of longitude that have been passed. Our average course will be about N. 36° W. The direction of our drift is consequently a much more northerly one than the Jeannette's was, and this is just what we expected; ours cuts hers at an angle of 59°. The line of this year's drift continued will cut the northeast island of Spitzbergen, and take us as far north as 84° 7', in 75° east longitude, somewhere N.N.E. of Franz Josef Land. The distance by this course to the Northeast Island is 827 miles. Should we continue to progress only at the rate of 189 miles a year it would take us 4.4 years to do this distance. But assuming our progress to be at the rate of 305 miles a year, we shall do it in 2.7 years. That we should drift at least as quickly as this seems probable, because we can hardly now be driven back as we were in October last year, when we had the open water to the south and the great mass of ice to the north of us.