“Perhaps you are right.  God grant that it may be so!”

As he spoke, they reached the fixed ice which ran along the foot of the precipices for some distance like a road of hard white marble.  Many large rocks lay scattered over it, some of them several tons in weight, and one or two balanced in a very remarkable way on the edge of the cliffs.

“There’s a curious-looking gull I should like to shoot,” exclaimed Fred, pointing to a bird that hovered over his head, and throwing forward the muzzle of his gun.

“Fire away, then,” said his friend, stepping back a pace.

Fred, being unaccustomed to the use of fire-arms, took a wavering aim and fired.

“What a bother!  I’ve missed it!”

“Try again,” remarked Tom with a quiet smile, as the whole cliff vomited forth an innumerable host of birds, whose cries were perfectly deafening.

“It’s my opinion,” said Fred with a comical grin, “that if I shut my eyes and point upwards I can’t help hitting something; but I particularly want yon fellow, because he’s beautifully marked.  Ah!  I see him sitting on a rock yonder, so here goes once more.”

Fred now proceeded towards the coveted bird in the fashion that is known by the name of stalking—­that is, creeping as close up to your game as possible, so as to get a good shot; and it said much for his patience and his future success the careful manner in which, on this occasion, he wound himself in and out among the rocks and blocks of ice on the shore in the hope of obtaining that sea-gull.  At last he succeeded in getting to within about fifteen yards of it, and then, resting his musket on a lump of ice, and taking an aim so long and steadily that his companion began to fancy he must have gone to sleep, he fired, and blew the gull to atoms!  There was scarcely so much as a shred of it to be found.

Fred bore his disappointment and discomfiture manfully.  He formed a resolution then and there to become a good shot, and although he did not succeed exactly in becoming so that day, he nevertheless managed to put several fine specimens of gulls and an auk into his bag.  The last bird amused him much, being a creature with a dumpy little body and a beak of preposterously large size and comical aspect.  There were also a great number of eider-ducks flying about, but they failed to procure a specimen.

Singleton was equally successful in his scientific researches.  He found several beautifully green mosses, one species of which was studded with pale yellow flowers, and in one place, where a stream trickled down the steep sides of the cliffs, he discovered a flower-growth which was rich in variety of colouring.  Amid several kinds of tufted grasses were seen growing a small purple flower and the white star of the chickweed; The sight of all this richness of vegetation growing in a little spot close beside the snow, and amid such cold Arctic scenery, would have delighted a much less enthusiastic spirit than that of our young surgeon.  He went quite into raptures with it, and stuffed his botanical box with mosses and rocks until it could hold no more, and became a burden that cost him a few sighs before he got back to the ship.