"Have to-day calculated our latitude and longitude for yesterday, and find it was 83° 36' N. and 59° 55' E. Our latitude agrees exactly with what I supposed, according to the dead reckoning, but our longitude is almost alarmingly westerly, in spite of the fact that our course has been the whole time somewhat southerly. There appears to be a strong drift in the ice here, and it will be better for us to keep east of the south, in order not to drift past land. To be quite certain, I have again reckoned out our observations of April 7th and 8th, but find no error, and cannot think otherwise than that we are about right. Still it seems remarkable that we have not yet seen any signs of land. 10 P.M., +1.4° Fahr. (-17° C.). "Friday, May 17th. +12.4° Fahr. (-10.9° C.); minimum, -19° C. To-day is the 'Seventeenth of May'--Constitution-day. I felt quite certain that by to-day, at any rate, we should have been on land somewhere or other, but fate wills otherwise; we have not even seen a sign of it yet. Alas! here I lie in the bag, dreaming day-dreams and thinking of all the rejoicings at home, of the children's processions and the undulating mass of people at this moment in the streets. How welcome a sight to see the flags, with their red bunting, waving in the blue spring atmosphere, and the sun shining through the delicate young green of the leaves. And here we are in drifting ice, not knowing exactly where we are, uncertain as to our distance from an unknown land, where we hope to find means of sustaining life and thence carve our way on towards home, with two teams of dogs whose numbers and strength diminish day by day, with ice and water between us and our goal which may cause us untold trouble, with sledges which now, at any rate, are too heavy for our own powers. We press laboriously onward mile by mile; and meanwhile, perhaps, the drift of the ice is carrying us westward out to sea, beyond the land we are striving for. A toilsome life, undeniably, but there will be an end to it some time; some time we shall reach it, and meanwhile our flag for the 'Seventeenth of May' shall wave above the eighty-third parallel, and if fate send us the first sight of land to-day our joy will be two-fold. "Yesterday was a hard day. The weather was fine, even brilliant, the going splendid, and the ice good, so that one had a right to expect progress were it not for the dogs. They pull up at everything, and for the man ahead it is a continual going over the same ground three times: first to find a way and make a track, and then back again to drive on the dogs; it is slow work indeed. Across quite flat ice the dogs keep up to the mark pretty well, but at the first difficulty they stop. I tried harnessing myself in front of them yesterday, and it answered pretty well; but when it came to finding the way in foul ice it had to be abandoned.