I cannot do better than quote the words of Sir George Nares, who, addressing our men before leaving England, whilst explaining to them the nature of the work that they were about to engage in, and speaking from his own personal previous experience of sledge life, said, "That if they could imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child's play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging!" These prophetic words were fully realized, and were often recalled and commented on by the men during their initiation into the work of sledging. The autumn sledge travelling has been alluded to by a very distinguished and successful explorer in the Arctic Regions, as "the very acme of discomfort." In the accuracy of this statement we, one and all, fully concurred. The principal reasons that sledging at this period of the year is more disagreeable than in the spring are, first, because the rapidly decreasing light caused by the sun's altitude lessening day by day is decidedly opposed to either work or comfort. Before our return from sledging, the sun had illumined for the last time, until its reappearance the following year, the summits of the snow-covered hills in the vicinity of the "Alert's" winter quarters, and had sunk, slowly and majestically, beneath the southern horizon, bequeathing to us only for a short time a few bright rays until the long polar night wrapped us in its sombre mantle, and enveloped us in gloom and obscurity for many months. "'Tis gone, that bright and orbèd blaze, Fast fading from our wistful gaze; Yon mantling cloud has hid from sight The last faint pulse of quivering light." A few hours of twilight, therefore, were all we had in which to work. Candles we had none. Our breakfast before we started in the morning and our supper after we halted in the evening had to be discussed in gloomy darkness. Our notes had to be written in our journals before entering the tent, even at the risk of frost-bitten fingers.