The appearance of the sun became now the one absorbing event. About it everybody thought and everybody talked continually. No set of men ever looked more eagerly for a coming joy than did we for the promised morn,--we, half-bloodless beings, coming from the night, bleached in the long-continued lamp-light, and almost as colorless as potato-sprouts growing in a dark cellar. We all noted how to-day compared with yesterday, and contrasted it with this day a week ago. Even the old cook caught the contagion, and crawled up from among his saucepans and coppers, and, shading his eyes with his stove-hardened hands, peered out into the growing twilight. "I tinks dis be very long night," said he, "and I likes once more to see de blessed sun." The steward was in a state of chronic excitement. He could not let the sun rest in peace for an hour. He must watch for him constantly. He must be forever running up on deck and out on the ice, book in hand, trying to read by the returning daylight. He was impatient with the time. "Don't the Commander think the sun will come back sooner than the 18th?" "Don't he think it will come back on the 17th?" "Was he quite sure that it wouldn't appear on the 16th?" "I'm afraid, steward, we must rely upon the Nautical Almanac." "But mightn't the Nautical Almanac be wrong?"--and I could clearly perceive that he thought my ciphering might be wrong too. Meanwhile we were tormented with another set of gales, and we could scarcely stir abroad. The ice was all broken up in the outer bay, and the open sea came nearer to us than during any previous period of the winter. The ice was nearly all driven out of the bay, and the broad, dark, bounding water was not only in sight from the deck, but I could almost drop a minie-ball into it from my rifle, while standing on the poop. Even the ice in the inner harbor was loosened around the shore, and, thick and solid though it was, I thought at one time that there was danger of its giving way and going bodily out to sea. [Sidenote: ARCTIC BIRDS.] Strange, too, along the margin of this water there came a flock of speckled birds to shelter themselves under the lee of the shore, and to warm their little feet in the waters which the winds would not let freeze. They were the _Dovekie_ of Southern Greenland,--the _Uria grylle_ of the naturalist. They are often seen about Disco Island and Upernavik in the winter time, but I was much surprised to find them denizens of the Arctic night so near the Pole. It was a singular sight to see them paddling about in the caves, under the ice-foot, at 30° below zero, uttering their plaintive cry, and looking for all the world like homeless children, shoeless and in rags, crouching for shelter beneath a door-stoop on a bleak December night. I wanted one of them badly for a specimen, but it would have required something stronger than the claims of science to have induced me to harm a feather of their trembling little heads. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXI.