During the early part of the voyage, while we were still sailing, or even during considerable detentions in harbor, there was, novelty and incident enough to give the mind employment. The weather was fine; the sun shone; we lived on deck, in company with sun, sea, sky, horizon; and the mere relief from the narrowness of in-door life, the wide fellowship with the elements in which we were established, sufficed of themselves to invest our days with an unfailing charm. I was peculiarly happy, for I love the sea. All its ordinary aspects delight me in a very deep and heartfelt way. These were varied in the present instance with much that to me was far from being ordinary. Ever there was some ascending shore, some towering island or prodigious cliff, some enticing bird, some magnificence of morning or evening; and besides all these and a hundred attractions more, there were the beauty and terror of berg and floe-field, the marvel of the ice. For a time, therefore, all was enchantment. If we made a harbor, if we left one, expectation sailed with us; we fancied new scenes, new adventures,--the delight of exploration yet fierce in our souls. But now comes a change. The novelty wears away; we get in some degree the gauge of the scenery and the variety of circumstance; the dawdling, snail-foot, insufferable creep of the ship from one fisherman's dog's-hole to another becomes inexcusable; the weather conspires against us; the sportsman wonders why he had brought gun and fishing-rod; even Science grows weary at times in its limited and hampered inspection. For more than five weeks our average progress along the coast was eight miles a day! The ice and the weather were partly responsible for this lagging; but there were other causes, at which I forbear to hint more definitely. Suffice it to say that they were of a kind that one finds it hard to be charmed with; and the Elder will here confide to the reader that he was in the end a much vexed individual. _Ennui_ overtook us first in Square Island Harbor. During our long duress there, outward objects of interest began to fail, and each man was thrown back in some degree upon his own resources. Now follows a special development of idiosyncrasy, and with it of friction. Kept below much of the time by inclement weather, we are crowded and jumbled incessantly together; you jostle against the shoulders of one, you rub elbows with another, you clamber over the knees of a third; the members of the company are thrust together more closely than husband and wife in the narrowest household, and there is no exhaustless spousal love, no nameless mutual charm of man and woman, to relieve the sharpness of contact. Every man's peculiarities come out; and as there is no space between one and another, every man's peculiarities jar upon those of his neighbor. One is rampant just when another is moodily silent; one wishes to sleep when another must shout or split.