"Bought! If the schooner would only come back, I should think nothing of all that. It's the cost of the vessel and outfit, Mary, that weighs so much on _my_ spirits. Well, Gar'ner's first business is with them islands, which are at an awful distance for one to trust his property; but, 'nothing ventured, nothing got,' they say. By my calculations, the schooner has had to go a good five hundred miles among the ice, to get to the spot; not such ice as a body falls in with, in going and coming between England and Ameriky, as we read of in the papers, but ice that covers the sea as we sometimes see it piled up in Gar'ner's Bay, only a hundred times higher, and deeper, and broader, and colder! It's desperate _cold_ ice, the sealers all tell me, that of the antarctic seas. Some on 'em think it's colder down south than it is the other way, up towards Greenland and Iceland itself. It's extr'or'nary, Mary, that the weather should grow cold as a body journeys south; but so it is, by all accounts. I never could understand it, and it isn't so in Ameriky, I'm sartain. I suppose it must come of their turning the months round, and having their winter in the midst of the dog-days. I never could understand it, though Gar'ner has tried, more than once, to reason me into it. I believe, but I don't understand." "It is all told in my geography here," answered Mary, mechanically taking down the book, for her thoughts were far away in those icy seas that her uncle had been so graphically describing. "I dare say we can find it all explained in the elementary parts of this book." "They _do_ make their geographies useful, now-a-days," said the deacon, with rather more animation than he had shown before, that morning. "They've got 'em to be, now, almost as useful as almanacs. Read what it says about the seasons, child." "It says, sir, that the changes in the seasons are owing to 'the inclination of the earth's axis to the plane of its orbit,' I do not exactly understand what that means, uncle.' "No,--it's not as clear as it might be.--The declination--" "Inclination, sir, is what is printed here." "Ay, inclination. I do not see why any one should have much inclination for winter, but so it must be, I suppose. The Earth's orbit has an inclination towards changes,' you say." "The changes in the seasons, sir, are owing to 'the inclination of the earth's axis to the plane of its orbit.' It does not say that the orbit has an inclination in any particular way."