Properly speaking, however, the snow rather may be said to have dried up than melted, for it was absorbed by the air, which was dry and bracing.
The flakes, that had up to now continued coming down without cessation, also ceased to fall--much to our satisfaction, as I need hardly add; for, albeit it is very nice to look out from a warm, well-furnished room at the beautiful winter garb of Nature, and highly enjoyable to go out snowballing, when you can leave it off and go indoors to a jolly fire when you like, it was a very different matter to us now to experience all the discomforts of those dreadful, icy, spongy, little feathery nuisances penetrating beneath every loophole they could find entrance to, in the apology for a tent that we had, and to have our clothing sodden by it, our fire put out, and our blood congealed.

Perhaps even the most ardent snow-lover would lose his taste for the soft molecules under such circumstances! On the fifth day, the sun appeared again, when Captain Billings took advantage of the opportunity for getting an observation as to our position, using Mr Macdougall's sextant, his own and mine having gone to the bottom when the long-boat was upset.

The skipper, I may add, had also to make use of the mate's watch--the chronometer that had been brought from the ship having shared the fate of the other instruments, standard compass and all having passed into the safe keeping of old Neptune and his Tritons, who, if they cared about the study of meteorology, had a rare haul on this occasion! The observation he now obtained only confirmed the skipper's previous impression that we were on Herschel Island, one of the Hermite, or Cape Horn group, the mountainous peaks of which are mainly composed of green stone, in which hornblende and feldspar are more or less conspicuous, and the presence of iron very apparent, some of the rocks being intensely magnetic, causing the needle of a little pocket compass I had to execute all sorts of strange freaks.
When the weather got fine, we took a walk round the island as far as the ridge that bisected it would allow, finding the elevated ground clothed with thickly growing trees, principally a species of spruce fir called the antarctic beech, which runs to a height of some thirty or forty feet, with a girth of five or six feet.

It is a magnificent evergreen, and would look well on an English lawn, for it has a splendid spreading head.
Beside this beech, there was a pretty little laurel tree, and the arbutus, which one of the sailors, who was from Devonshire, would persist in calling a myrtle bush, although the skipper showed him the berries to convince him to the contrary.

There was also a sort of wild strawberry plant plentiful enough about, running like a vine over the rocks under the cliff; but there was nothing like what we call grass to be seen anywhere, only clumps or tussocks of a fibrous material like hemp, with long, ragged, straggling ends.
So much for the botany of the island; as for the living creatures, "barring ourselves," as Pat Doolan would have expressed it, there were "race horses," "steamer" ducks, and penguins, besides a species of wild goose that we had seen off the Falkland Islands, and which Sails described to me as being so tough that a shipmate of his, who was once trying to gnaw through the drumstick of one when in Stanley Harbour, had his eye knocked out by the bone "fetching back" sharply through the elasticity of the tendon which his teeth missed hold of--a tough morsel to chew away at, if the yarn be true, eh?
But, amongst all these specimens of animated nature, we did not see a trace of any of the natives--a fact which I took care to point out to the skipper, expressing my belief that he had only been romancing about the "cannibals," as he termed them.
He, however, denied this.
"No, my lad," he said.