Once fairly taken into the bosom of the ice-field, we had eyes for little else. Its forms were a surprise, so varied and so beautiful. I had supposed that field-ice was made up of flat cakes,--and _cake_ of all kinds is among the flattest things I know! But here if was, simulating all shapes, even those of animated creatures, with the art of a mocking bird,--and simulating all in a material pure as amber, though more varied in color. One saw about him cliffs, basaltic columns, frozen down, arabesques, fretted traceries, sculptured urns, arches supporting broad tables or sloping roofs, lifted pinnacles, boulders, honey-combs, slanting strata of rock, gigantic birds, mastodons, maned lions, couching or rampant,--a fantasy of forms, and, between all, the shining, shining sea. In sunshine, these shapes were of a glistening white flecked with stars, where at points the white was lost in the glisten; in half shadow the color was gray, in full shadow aerial purple; while, wherever the upper portions projected over the sea, and took its reflection, they often did, the color was an infinite, emerald intensity of green; beneath all which, under water, was a base or shore of dead emerald, a green paled with chalk. Blue was not this day seen, perhaps because this was shore-ice rather than floe,--made, not like the floes, of frozen sea, but of compacted and saturated snow. Just before evening came, when the courteous breeze folded its light fans fell asleep, we left this field behind, and, seeing all clear ahead, supposed the whole had been passed. In truth, as had soon to learn, this twenty-mile strip of shore-ice was but the advance-guard of an immeasurable field or army of floe. For there came down the northern coast, in this summer of 1864, more than a thousand miles' length, with a breadth of about a hundred miles, of floe-ice in a field almost unbroken! More than a thousand miles, by accurate computation! The courtesy of the Westerner--who, having told of seeing a flock of pigeons nine miles long, so dense as to darken the sun at noonday, and meeting objections from a skeptical Yankee, magnanimously offered, as a personal favor, to "take out a quarter of a mile from the thinnest part"--cannot be imitated here. I must still say _more_ than a thousand miles,--and this, too, the second run of ice!