7. The space in the boats being insufficient for the crew and all the baggage we had to take, Weyprecht determined to send back Orel and nine men to bring away the jolly-boat, which had been left behind, and I went on in the dog-sledge to help in the work of removing more stores from the ship. It took me just three hours to do the distance, which it had cost the advanced parties eight days to accomplish. The activity of the dogs received a fresh stimulus from their coming on the track of a bear running in the direction of the ship, and when we came within 1,000 yards of it, there we saw our enemy, who, however, thought it more prudent not to await our attack. On the 7th of June the equipment of the jolly-boat was completed, and we returned to our companions with a load of 3 cwt. of boiled beef, shot, and other necessaries. The old track, now well trodden down, proved a great advantage to us. If we had deviated a single step, we should at once have stuck fast, for the character of the snow had altered, and where it lay in masses it had become mere sludge. The temperature, which at the end of May had varied between 25° and 19° F., rose, on June 1, to freezing-point, and remained steady at that point for some time. Even during the weeks of midsummer the temperature rose only a few degrees above freezing-point. On the 3rd of June it rained for the first time, and gradually the weather assumed the character of fogs and driving mists so common to the Arctic Ocean. Clear days were of rare occurrence, and, occasionally only, the sun shone for a few hours. On our return to the boats we found their crews were sitting up and looking out, like young birds in a nest, to see what we had brought from the ship. Tobacco was regarded as a right royal gift, and Dr. Kepes, to whom I gave a shirt-sleeve well stuffed out with the precious weed, regarded himself as a Crœsus. 8. Meantime our longings to launch grew apace; anxiously we looked for the widening of a fissure to enable us to advance southward. We attempted again and again to approach the “ice-hole,” but always found insuperable difficulties to bar the way. The effort to get one of our boats into a dock we had hewn in the ice nearly ended in its loss, and nothing was left to us but to repeat the flank march along the fatal “ice-hole” to the “harbour of Aulis,” there to watch for the breaking-up of the ice. Throughout the day we sat penned up in the boats, worn-out with a feeling of indescribable weariness, each morning longing for the end of the day, and at every meal thinking when the next would be ready. It seemed as if the time for launching the boats would never come. When the hoarse melancholy scream of the burgomaster-gull sounded through the stillness of the night, it seemed like a demon voice from another world, proclaiming that all our efforts would avail nothing to deliver us from the icy power which held us in its grasp. A visit from a bear was a welcome change in the monotony of our life.