It required a good deal of nerve for a mariner to run in among dangers of the character just described, as the sun was setting.  Nevertheless, Daggett did it; and Roswell Gardiner followed the movement, at the distance of about a cable’s length.  To prevent separation, each schooner showed a light at the lower yard-arm, just as the day was giving out its last glimmerings.  As yet, however, no difficulty was encountered; the alpine-looking range being yet quite two hours’ run still to leeward.  Those two hours must be passed in darkness; and Daggett shortened sail in order not to reach the ice before the moon rose.  He had endeavoured to profit by the light as long as it remained, to find a place at which he might venture to enter among the bergs, but had met with no great success.  The opening first seen now appeared to be closed, either by means of the drift or by means of the change in the position of the vessels; and he no longer thought of that.  Fortune must be trusted to, in some measure; and on he went, Roswell always closely following.

The early hours of that eventful night were intensely dark.  Nevertheless, Daggett stood down towards the icy range, using no other precautions than shortening sail and keeping a sharp look-out.  Every five minutes the call from the quarter-deck of each schooner to “keep a bright look-out” was heard, unless, indeed, Daggett or Roswell was on his own forecastle, thus occupied in person.  No one on board of either vessel thought of sleep.  The watch had been called, as is usual at sea, and one half of the crew was at liberty to go below and turn in.  What was more, those small fore-and-aft rigged craft were readily enough handled by a single watch; and this so much the more easily, now that their top-sails were in.  Still, not a man left the deck.  Anxiety was too prevalent for this, the least experienced hand in either crew being well aware that the next four-and-twenty hours would, in all human probability, be decisive of the fate of the voyage.

Both Daggett and Gardiner grew more and more uneasy as the time for the moon to rise drew near, without the orb of night making its appearance.  A few clouds were driving athwart the heavens, though the stars twinkled as usual, in their diminutive but sublime splendour.  It was not so dark that objects could not be seen at a considerable distance; and the people of the schooners had no difficulty in very distinctly tracing, and that not very far ahead, the broken outlines of the chain of floating mountains.  No alpine pile, in very fact, could present a more regular or better defined range, and in some respects more fantastic outlines.  When the bergs first break away from their native moorings, their forms are ordinarily somewhat regular; the summits commonly resembling table-land.  This regularity of shape, however, is soon lost under the rays of the summer sun, the wash of the ocean, and most of all by the wear of the torrents that gush