Nor is the list of discomforts complete. When leaving the River Plate the air in the saloon and state-rooms was insufferably close. There was no ventilation for the state-rooms save through the doors into the saloon. The saloon was ventilated through the doors at the head of the companionway and through the skylight, but there was no sort of wind sail or device to force the air down. In the summer time in the River Plate, where the thermometer sometimes marks 110 deg. in the shade, that saloon is to be compared only with a Turkish bath. In winter, while coasting along Tierra del Fuego, that same saloon becomes like the vault of a cold storage company. The air is saturated with moisture, and the temperature barely above the freezing point. The moisture gathered like dew on the walls of the saloon as well as of the state-rooms, and sometimes trickled down to form little pools in the bunks and on the floor. There was no device for heating or drying the cabin, neither stove nor steam-coil. We were dressed continually in the heaviest flannels, and wore heavy overcoats, but the chill air penetrated everything, even to the marrow of the bones. I once passed two weeks in Greenland in the month of October, and exactly two years later was digging away the snow in the Rocky Mountains nine thousand feet above the sea, that I might have bare ground for my blankets at night. My home is in the Adirondacks, where the snow lies four feet deep all winter long, but I have never suffered from the cold as I did during four weeks of this voyage. And yet at times, when the conditions were such as to make us all most uncomfortable, we often enjoyed life rather better than at any others. Our greatest trouble when the weather first became cold was to pass the evenings. It was stupid turning into wet bunks at 7 P.M., and wretched work trying to play cards or spin stories in a raw, cold, reeking saloon. But a happy inspiration struck one of us while standing by the hatch leading to the little store-room abaft the cabin. This store-room was in charge of the shortest and thickest man aboard ship--a person who looked as if he had once been a typical quartermaster on a Yankee man-o'-war--a great tall, broad-shouldered, impassive, full-whiskered man, but through some accident had been telescoped down to a stature of four feet nine. The first cold evening after leaving the River Plate a passenger, while walking the deck for exercise, stopped by the store-room hatch just as the captain's valet came there carrying a plate with a tumbler on it. "Storekeeper?" said the lackey. "Yes," replied the thick, short man. "Cocktail." "Yes, sir. Quickly."