"Travellers' stories,"--"_A beau mentir qui vient de loin_,"--these proverbs date from the seventeenth century. It was not expected of such adventurous gentlemen that they should tell the simple truth, any more than we expect veracity from sportsmen. We listen without surprise and disbelieve without a smile. Some exaggeration, too, was pardonable to help out the verse; but "_nobis ubi defuit orbis_" goes beyond a reasonable license. The mountain _Metavara_ is in Lat. 68 deg. 30'; the North Cape in 71 deg. 10'. There were still one hundred and fifty miles of solid _orbis_ before Regnard and his friends; and they had need of optics sharp to see the Cape from the spot they stood upon. The 27th of September found the three Arctic explorers back again in Stockholm. Thence they took boat for Dantzic, travelled in Poland, Hungary, and Austria, and left Vienna for Paris a few months before the famous siege, when Sobieski, the "man sent from God whose name was John," routed the Turks and delivered Christendom forever from the fear of the Ottoman arms. Before this time Regnard must have heard that Duquesne had avenged his African sufferings. In the autumn of 1681 the Huguenot Admiral shelled Algiers from bomb-ketches, then used for the first time. The Dey was forced to surrender. His lively conquerors treated him with the honors of wit as well as of war. They made a _mot_ for him, of the kind they get up so cleverly in Paris. When the Turk is told how much it had cost the great monarch of France to fit out the fleet which had just reduced a part of his city to ashes, he exclaims, amazed at the useless extravagance,--"For half the money I would have burned the whole town."