Sure enough, when the day came out distinctly, it was seen that ice of sufficient thickness to bear men on it, covered the entire surface within the crescent.  Daggett and his people were already at work on it, using the saw.  They must have taken the alarm before the return of day, for the schooner was not only free from the ground, but had been brought fully a cable’s length without the cove.  Gardiner watched the movements of Daggett and his crew with a glass for a short time, when he ordered all hands called.  The cook was already in the galley, and a warm breakfast was soon prepared.  After eating this, the two whale-boats were lowered, and Roswell and Hazard both rowed as far as the ice would permit them, when they walked the rest of the way to the imprisoned craft, taking with them most of their hands, together with the saw.

It was perhaps fortunate for Daggett that it soon began to blow fresh from the northward, sending into the bay a considerable sea, which soon broke up the ice, and enabled the Vineyard craft to force her way through the fragments, and join her consort about noon.

Glad enough was Roswell to regain his own vessel; and he made sail on a wind, determined to beat out of the narrow waters at every hazard, the experience of that night having told him that they had remained in the cove too long.  Daggett followed willingly, but not like a man who had escaped by the skin of his teeth, from wintering near the antarctic circle.

Chapter XXII.

  “Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream,
  With the wan moon overhead,
  There stood, as in an awful dream,
  The army of the dead.”

  Longfellow.

Most of our readers will understand what was meant by Mary Pratt’s “inclination of the earth’s axis to the plane of its orbit;” but as there may be a few who do not, and as the consequences of this great physical fact are materially connected with the succeeding events of the narrative, we propose to give such a homely explanation of the phenomenon as we humbly trust will render it clear to the most clouded mind.  The orbit of the earth is the path which it follows in space in its annual revolution around the sun.  To a planet there is no up or down, except as ascent and descent are estimated from and towards itself.  In all other respects it floats in vacuum, or what is so nearly so as to be thus termed.  Now, let the uninstructed reader imagine a large circular table, with a light on its surface, and near to its centre.  The light shall represent the sun, the outer edge of the circle of the table the earth’s orbit, and its surface the plane of that orbit.  In nature there is no such thing as a plane at all, the space within the orbit being vacant; but the surface of the table gives a distinct notion of the general position of the earth as it travels round the sun.  It is scarcely necessary to say that the axis of the earth is an imaginary line drawn through the planet, from one pole to the other; the name being derived from the supposition that our daily revolution is made on this axis.