With an atmosphere as thick as pea-soup, and no sun, moon, or stars to be seen, there was no keeping the shore (and to go on one side or the other was to incur the certainty of losing ourselves again, either on the Inlet or on the land) without hugging close up and into a break-neck line of stranded fragments of ice, which indicated the direction of the beach. “Along this formidable path we floundered on—now coming bump up against some huge fragment of ice, or pitching over the top of it into a hole, excavated in the snow at the bottom, by the whirling eddies of the wind; now walking, now crawling, occasionally tumbling into the snow, until we were all brought up by a cry of pain from one of the men who had met a ‘_bouleversement_’ over the edge of a bank of ice. It was a sad accident, but the worst of it was, that after setting him on his legs, nothing could induce him to move a step farther. Here he was, and here he maintained he must remain ‘_coute qui coute_.’ There was no reasoning with the poor fellow, who certainly had sustained a very severe injury, but not anything like so bad as he had imagined it, and it would never do to leave him lying here. So feigning to take him at his word, we proposed to bundle him up in a buffalo-robe and bury him in the snow for the night—comforting him with the assurance that we would certainly come back for him in the morning. This Arctic prescription had a magical effect upon our patient—the back and the broken bones were speedily forgotten, and in a short time he was on his legs again, and we all trudging on once more in the old rough and tumble style of progression, till about midnight, we found ourselves standing under the lee of something which looked like a bank of snow, but which, to our great gratification, proved to be the powder house we had erected on shore in the beginning of the winter. A consultation was now held whether we should cut our way into it and pass the night here, ‘accoutred as we were,’ or make for the ship, which we now knew could not be far off. Our decision was for the latter, and the only question now was, how to steer for the vessel. This, too, was decided upon at last, by each of the party pointing in turn, in the direction in which he thought the vessel lay, and then taking the mean of the bearings. To prevent our separating in the drift (for some of the party had by this time got so benumbed with cold, as to be unable to use their hands to clear their eyelids, and had thus become literally blind with the accumulation of the snow on their eyes), it was agreed that at certain intervals we should call and answer each other’s names, and that those whose eyes had suffered least should take the others in tow. In this order, we proceeded for the vessel, and fortunately by the guidance of a solitary star, that could be faintly distinguished through the drift, got near enough to the ship to hear the wind whistling through