Letters from High Latitudes by Lord Dufferin
page 229 of 305 (75%)
page 229 of 305 (75%)
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something like what one used to feel the first morning
after one's return from school, on seeing pink curtains glistening round one's head, instead of the dirty-white boards of a turned-up bedstead. When Wilson came in with my hot water, I could not help triumphantly remarking to him,--"Well, Wilson, you see we've got to Spitzbergen, after all!" But Wilson was not a man to be driven from his convictions by facts; he only smiled grimly, with a look which meant--"Would we were safe back again!" Poor Wilson! he would have gone only half way with Bacon in his famous Apothegm; he would willingly "commit the Beginnings of all actions to Argus with his hundred eyes, and the Ends"--to Centipede, with his hundred legs. "First to watch, and then to speed"--away! would have been his pithy emendation. Immediately after breakfast we pulled to the shore, carrying in the gig with us the photographic apparatus, tents, guns, ammunition, and the goat. Poor old thing! she had suffered dreadfully from sea-sickness, and I thought a run ashore might do her good. On the left-hand side of the bay, between the foot of the mountain and the sea, there ran a low flat belt of black moss, about half a mile broad; and as this appeared the only point in the neighbourhood likely to offer any attraction to reindeer, it was on this side that I determined to land. My chief reason for having run into English Bay rather than Magdalena Bay was because we had been told at Hammerfest that it was the more likely place of the two for deer; and as we were sadly in want of fresh meat this |
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