Summer at Floeberg Beach was an affair of weeks, almost of days. The turning-point came silently and quickly—not in quite the demonstrative fashion some of us expected, with an abrupt bursting forth of ravines and a general rush of torrents to the sea, but still suddenly. Three-fourths of the snow disappeared as if by magic, and the dark patches of bare land grew broader and broader every day. In some places the earth passed at once from frozen rock to dust; in others marshy spots formed, and there the whole ground was cut up into the hexagonal bosses that form a very striking feature in Arctic foregrounds. A view of Floeberg Beach from Cape Rawson (Plate No. 4), sketched on 18th July, gives an idea of how the land looked in summer. Even near the shores it is never altogether free from snow. Permanent drifts lie in the hollows, and from the crests of the cliffs at Cape Rawson a great bank several hundred feet in height sloped downward to the “mud flats” below. Trickling streams cut their way vertically down through the snow or flow in tunnels under it, then wind across the marshy flats, and end in some of the ravines that intersect the land like Lancashire “cloughs.” For great part of the year the ravines are merely more or less deep grooves in the monotonous undulating whiteness, but in summer they hold brown foaming torrents rushing between steep undermined banks of snow, quite unfordable if deeper than the knee. These are the rivers of the country, but they cannot run out to sea, like ordinary streams; the grounded pack-edge prevents them; so they expend much of their energy in destroying the green one-season’s ice, filling the lagoon between barrier bergs and beach. The snow was no sooner off the land than the flowers were in bloom—not very gorgeous specimens certainly, but still flowers, and with more than their share of tender sentiment, as might be seen by many bright little nosegays gathered for our invalids by the rough hands of messmates. First came close clumps of magenta-tinted saxifrage, with scarcely a trace of a leaf, and fading as fast as it bloomed; then tiny yellow _Drabas_, and white coltsfoot, and woolly willow catkins; and later, when the sorrel leaves, each as large as a sixpence, began to get red and tasteless, the yellow poppies appeared, and with them the delicately-tinted strawberry-like flowers of _Dryas octopetala_. Plants were of course few and far between—for example, four men searching all day could just gather one plateful of the valuable sorrel. All, too, were on the most Liliputian scale, seldom more than an inch above ground, but with immensely long roots. Sometimes, as we sat sketching or picking sorrel, a mosquito or two would present themselves, but they did not bite like their brethren of the Greenland settlements. A small sort of dragon-fly was not uncommon near pools, and now and then a small brown butterfly, an _Argynnus_, or, more rarely, a yellow _Colias_, would flit by, looking