In days gone by the sealing ships were all schooners and just as these gave way to wooden steamers so the latter will be supplanted by ships with steel hulls, and the _Midnight Sun_ was the first of these fine new steel craft. For size and power she put it all over the _Polar Bear_, but she lacked the glamor of romance and for this reason I liked my ship the best. I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool once and we straightway became better acquainted. He told me that the firm who owned the _Polar Bear_ also owned the _Midnight Sun_ and that the Captains of them were to work together. A new experiment was to be tried, he said, and that was to catch seals by wireless, but what the _modus operandi_ of the scheme was he hadn’t the faintest idea and no more had I. I remember when I was a little boy that folks talked about running street cars by electricity and I wondered how it could be done. I had a kind of a vague notion that a chunk of electricity came along, struck the car and pushed it ahead just as a breeze fills the sails of a ship and carries her for’ard. In after years I learned that the current of electricity flowed along a wire parallel with the tracks and that it passed from this feeder to the trolley of a car, thence down a conductor to a motor which it energized and finally back to the power house through the rails; further that it was the power of the motor thus developed which drove the wheels of the car; and I was disappointed, for it seemed to me to be altogether too round-about a way--too far-fetched--to justify the statement that the “car runs by electricity.” The same thing holds good when you see signs which read, “_hats cleaned by electricity_,” “_eggs hatched by electricity_,” and “_diamonds made by electricity_,” for the hat is merely rotated by an electric motor, the eggs are hatched in an incubator which is heated by a current flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are made in an electric furnace. Now catching seals by wireless was to my mind quite a vague, mysterious and altogether a difficult proposition to see into--even as running a car by electricity was when I was a little shaver. Seals are wonderful creatures, as you will admit if you ever saw them do a balancing act in a show, and I have heard that they have a great liking for music. A seal hunter can take a phonograph, put a band record on it, set it up where there is a patch of seals and start it going. The seals will come out of the water to listen to the sweet strains and every time one puts its nose above the surface the hunter, who is lying a little way off, will shoot it with his rifle. This then is what you might call _hunting seals with music_.