March 31.--The wind has veered to the north and is still coming with the force of a half-gale. There are great drifts of snow lined about the bark and over the pack. The temperature is -2° C. Everything is wet and far more uncomfortable than it is when the thermometer is at -20°. The captain and Amundsen have brought aboard two small live penguins and turned them over to Racovitza for physiological experiments. We find it very difficult to bring in our game. It takes the full force of three men to drag the skin and blubber of one seal, weighing perhaps two hundred and fifty pounds. One man cannot drag more than two royal penguins on a sledge when the snow is either extremely dry or slightly humid, as it has been for the past few weeks, but if the penguins are bunched and dragged on their own feathers without a sledge, a man is able to draw six with ease. The lesson which we have learned from this experience is that sledges, if possible, should be shod with a strip of penguin skin with feathers attached. We are designing such a sledge to-day. It is certainly the first effort of the kind on record and we hope it will prove useful. April 1.--The storm still continues and the barometer is steadily falling, but the wind is coming in gusts, which is a cheerful indication that its force is nearly spent. The one food upon which the most unlimited hatred has been heaped is the fiskabolla. The cook serves these on Fridays, and the coarse sarcasm brought out before and after dinner is certainly remarkable. In the cabin only two men, Gerlache and Amundsen, eat the soft, tasteless, fiberless, and useless things, and they seem to put them away with a grim relish. Lecointe has touched them but once since crossing the Atlantic from Madeira to Rio. Two weeks ago he made a bet with Racovitza, which was supported by a resolution to eat four fiskabolla. Lecointe lost and selected April first on which to pay his forfeit. Poor fellow! I believe he would rather have paid a hundred dollars. He ate the things, but he suffered with gastric discomfort for a week, and resolved forever afterwards never to touch, taste, or smell “embalmed fishballs.” April 2.--The storm has ceased, and a lighter wind is coming from the south-west. The sky is fairly clear at the zenith, but a bank of atmosphere, charged with fine ice crystals, hangs over the pack and makes the horizon obscure. The sun and the moon, rising and descending through this haze of ice, are distorted, refracted, and deflected, into all sorts of curious fantastic shapes. To-night there was a parhelion in prismatic colours. There was a simple reproduction of the image of the sun, one to each side, and the three suns sank slowly under the hazy violet of the horizon. Soon after, the moon rose through the same haze of floating ice crystals, with luminous spots indicating crescentic rings and four distant moon dogs.