I remained in the cabin all the morning, reading beside the fire. Whilst we were at dinner, the mate, shaggy in thick pilot cloth and a great fur cap between whose ear-covers his face lay small as though withered by the cold into a mere leer of eye and a purple nose jewelled with a little icicle, came half-way down the companion ladder. 'There's a big island jumped out of a snowfall on the lee bow,' he exclaimed. 'The lady'll like to see it p'raps,' having said which he instantly returned on deck. Strangely enough, though we had measured many leagues of ocean often for months and months studded with bergs, we had down to this hour sighted nothing of the sort. I had longed to see an iceberg before all other sights of the deep, and at once wrapped myself up, and went on deck with the captain. On stepping to the lee side, there on the bow about two miles off we beheld a vast iceberg like a mighty cathedral in alabaster shaping itself out of a soft vapoury shadow! As each feature of the mass stole out it showed with an ivory-like clearness against the hoary soot of the snow-cloud past it; the swell of the sea washed the base in a large surf. The water was lead coloured as the sky; its heavings were slow and stubborn, and each volume rolled along as though it were of oil or quicksilver. Some lovely snow-white petrels darted swallow-like athwart our sluggish wake. I cannot express how their beauty deepened, to the imagination, the sky-wide loneliness of this scene of ocean with its ice-island there, material as rock, dissoluble as the smallest of the flakes falling upon it--a mere dream of substance--a pageant of the deep as illusive as the tapestries of the clouds. Many shadows of snow hung round the sea. It was like entering a vast arena funereal with draperies. 'What does that iceberg remind you of?' said Mr. Owen, approaching us with Mrs. Burke. 'Of a cathedral,' said I. 'Exactly,' he exclaimed. 'Winchester and Canterbury combined, with a hint from Strasburg in that corner to the right yonder, where its opening is clear of the snow.' 'A pretty little fairy toy to thump up against on a black howling night,' said Captain Burke, with an uneasy look round at the weather. 'This is as strange a day as ever I saw,' said Mrs. Burke. 'How long could people live on such an iceberg as that?' said I. 'Give 'em wreckage for huts and food and fuel, and they should live long enough to be taken off,' answered the captain. 'Ha!' exclaimed Mr. Owen, pensively regarding the majestic bulk, 'fancy finding one's self alone on such an island as that! An ice Crusoe!' 'I've known three whalers taken off a piece of ice four or five days before the lump they floated on would have melted under their feet,' said the captain. Mr. Owen viewed him with a smile. The captain abruptly left us, and standing at the wheel directed his eyes earnestly round the sea and up at the sky. Mrs. Burke said: