made one sorry to see them--they sniffed at and pushed her, and ran round and round, at a loss what to do in their despair. Meanwhile I had put another cartridge in the rifle, and picked off the other cub as it was standing on a projection. It fell over the declivity with a growl, and down on to its mother. Still more frightened than before, the other cub hastened to its succor; but, poor thing, what could it do? While its brother rolled over, growling, it stood there looking sorrowfully sometimes at it, sometimes at the mother, who lay dying in a pool of blood. When I approached, it turned its head away indifferently; what did it care about me now? All its kindred, everything it held dear, lay there mutilated and destroyed. It no longer knew whither to go, and did not move from the spot. I went right up to it, and, with a spherical ball through the breast, it fell dead beside its mother. "Johansen soon came up. A lane had detained him, so that he had lost ground. We opened the animals, took out the entrails, and then went back to the tent to fetch the sledges and dogs and proper flaying-knives. Our second cup of chocolate in the tent tasted very good after this interruption. When we had skinned and cut up the two bears we left them in a heap, covered over with the skins to protect the meat from the gulls; the third one we took back with us. The next day we fetched the others, and now have more meat food than we shall be able to consume, I hope. It is a good thing, though, that we can give the dogs as much raw meat as they will eat; they certainly require it. 'Suggen,' poor thing, is in a very bad way, and it is a question whether we can get any more work out of him. When we took him with us after the bears the first day, he could not walk, and we had to place him on the sledge; but then he howled so terrifically, as much as to say it was beneath his dignity to be transported in this way, that Johansen had to take him home again. The dogs seem to be attacked with a paralysis of the legs; they fall down, and have the greatest difficulty in rising. It has been the same with all of them, from 'Gulen' downward. 'Kaifas,' however, is as fresh and well as ever. "It is remarkable how large these cubs were. I could hardly imagine that they were born this year, and should without hesitation have put them down as a year old if the she-bear had not been in milk, and it is hardly to be supposed that the cubs would suck for a year and a half. Those we shot by the Fram on November 4th last year were hardly half the size of these. It would seem as if the polar bear produces its young at different times of the year. In the paunches of the cubs were pieces of skin from a seal.