It is usual to say that there are six months day and six months night in the polar basins.  This is true, literally, at the poles only; but, approximatively, it is true as a whole.  We apprehend that few persons—­none, perhaps, but those who are in habits of study—­form correct notions of the extent of what may be termed the icy seas.  As the polar circles are in 23 deg. 28”, a line drawn through the south pole, for instance, commencing on one side of the earth at the antarctic circle, and extending to the other, would traverse a distance materially exceeding that between New York and Lisbon.  This would make those frozen regions cover a portion of this globe that is almost as large as the whole of the Atlantic Ocean, as far south as the equator.  Any one can imagine what must be the influence of frost over so vast a surface, in reproducing itself, since the presence of ice-bergs is thought to affect our climate, when many of them drift far south in summer.  As power produces power, riches wealth, so does cold produce cold.  Fill, then, in a certain degree, a space as large as the North Atlantic Ocean with ice in all its varieties, fixed, mountain and field, berg and floe, and one may get a tolerably accurate notion of the severity of its winters, when the sun is scarce seen above the horizon at all, and then only to shed its rays so obliquely as to be little better than a chill-looking orb of light, placed in the heavens simply to divide the day from the night.

This, then, was the region that Roswell Gardiner was so very anxious to leave; the winter he so much dreaded.  Mary Pratt was before him, to say nothing of his duty to the deacon; while behind him was the vast polar ocean just described, about to be veiled in the freezing obscurity of its long and gloomy twilight, if not of absolute night.  No wonder, therefore, that when he trimmed his sails that evening, to beat out of the great bay, that it was done with the earnestness with which we all perform duties of the highest import, when they are known to affect our well-being, visibly and directly.

“Keep her a good full, Mr. Hazard,” said Roswell, as he was leaving the deck, to take the first sleep in which he had indulged for four-and-twenty hours; “and let her go through the water.  We are behind our time, and must keep in motion.  Give me a call if anything like ice appears in a serious way.”

Hazard “ay-ay’d” this order, as usual, buttoned his pee-jacket tighter than ever, and saw his young superior—­the transcendental delicacy of the day is causing the difference in rank to be termed “senior and junior”—­but Hazard saw his superior go below, with a feeling allied to envy, so heavy were his eye-lids with the want of rest.  Stimson was in the first-mate’s watch, and the latter approached that old sea-dog with a wish to keep himself awake by conversing.

“You seem as wide awake, king Stephen,” the mate remarked, “as if you never felt drowsy!”