THE JEANNETTE, I knew a boy who cured himself of a longing to go to the Arctic regions by a very simple plan. He read in the book of an explorer, that if any one desired to get an idea of what winter among the ice was like, he should sit alone in a dark coal-cellar for a few hours. Sitting there he would be able to imagine the gloom of the days: and a further effort of the imagination would enable him to add the bitterest cold to his sufferings. This boy went into a coal-cellar and stayed in it for several hours; he imagined himself to be in the hold of an Arctic ship, surrounded by hummocks of ice-and he didn't like it a bit. He abandoned all intention of going to sea, and the nearest he ever got to the Arctic Circle was Bangor, Maine. The survivors of the Jeannette arrived in New York a few days ago, and what they tell is scarcely more than a repetition of the now familiar perils and sufferings of those who venture into the icebound seas. Their little ship was in the grip of the ice for nearly two years, and then went down, leaving them to make a long and difficult journey to the wintry city of Siberia, Irkutsk. Some of their original number perished on the way, as you know, and the fate of another boat's crew is yet uncertain. Familiar as the story of Arctic exploration is, it has a charm no less potent than that which induces men to seek the pole itself in the face of every discouragement and in defiance of every instinct of self-preservation. The survivors of the Jeannette, who landed in New York a few days ago, to rejoin their friends after an absence of nearly three years, would, no doubt, be willing to venture forth again, though they have suffered so much; and like the fabled sirens, the spirit of the extreme North allures men into the frozen domain with inevitable fascination, while visiting the greatest pains upon those who yield to the invitation. The benefits to be derived from Arctic exploration must be almost entirely of a | scientific character, as there is nothing in those remote and desolate regions to tempt commercial enterprise-neither inhabitants nor products. It seems almost unaccountable that any youth who reads the adventures of the survivors of the Jeannette should ever want to go into the Arctic regions, but the ambition is a cherished one among many boys, and some of them would not abandon it even after a prolonged experi ment in a coal-cellar, or solitary confinement in a large refrigerator. One day was like nearly all the rest on board the Jeannette. At seven o'clock in the morning, during the winter, all hands were called and the galley-fires were lit; at nine, breakfast was served; the hours from eleven to one were devoted to exercise; dinner was eaten at three, when the galley-fires were put out to save coal, and between seven and eight there was tea. Only twenty-five pounds of coal a day were allowed for heating the cabin; twenty-five for the forecastle and ninety for cooking. The food consisted principally of canned articles, with the addition, now and then, of walrus sausages and seal steaks. In the winter, of course, lights were required at all times. Darkness reigned day and night, except when the aurora flashed its lovely colors up the sky. The men suffered in many ways from the cold, and among others, with pains after eating. The hours dragged along without interest. The ice thundered in the darkness, and the little ship quivered as if in pain. In many places it was twenty feet thick, and surrounded her in great hills. She was helpless in its clasp, and drifted to and fro with it. Sometimes the noise and vibration were terrific, and the esquimo dogs whined with fear. The ship began to leak from the pressure, and then the men found extra work at the pumps. It is a pitiful picture, this group of explorers braving the Arctic night; poorly fed; chilled; ailing from blindness and frost-bite, and in constant peril-groping | of them, but they managed to escape. the way about the deck and on the surrour ding ice in the cold of death, and waiting for the long-hidden sun to come agan. Yet they were of good heart. The no sub ere were no bickerings among them, The most touching thing in the record on in: CO to of them was crippled, he was unwillto leave his share of the work to his mpanions, and begged to be allowed continue, until the captain positively or ciered him into the hospital. Among the whole number there does not seem to have been one who was not a hero, not one who was petulant in suffering, or afraid to do his duty. The discipline was strict, but the conduct of the crew was so good that it was only necessary to punish one member, whose offence was profanity, during the twenty-one months the ship was in the pack. They celebrated Washington's Birthday and the Fourth of July by decking the masts with flags. On Christmas eve the Jeannette's "Minstrel Troupe" gave an entertainment, and on Christmas day a few luxuries were added to the ordinary dinner, the menu of which was written out with mock pomposity. But the voyage was lacking in A book on the Arctic regions, which the crew had been reading, was often criticized. In it the author says, "This part of the ocean is teeming with animal life, and navigable polynias are dent. numerous." The mother-bear lay down once or twice as if wounded, but she rose again and drove her cubs before her, and showed impatience when they moved slowly. Some foxes were also seen. They seemed to follow the bears as the pilot-fish follows the shark, and the jackal the lion. The naturalist of the expedition, Dr. Raymond Newcomb, a young gentleman of Salem, Mass., was not impressed with the courage of the bears. "Having read and heard much of the ferocious polar bear," he says, “I can never forget my feelings as on one occasion Mr. Collins (the meteorologist) and I approached two large ones which we had discovered. I thought they were going to show fight. Cocking our pieces we walked towards them, but when we were within four hundred yards one of them turned and left. "We got about one hundred yards nearer, when the remaining bear started off, shaking his head ominously. We immediately let go a shot each, which increased his speed, and we followed him in hot pursuit; but he and his companion soon distanced us. At first, I thought it was going to be a fight for life between us, and when I saw them turn and run, my only sensations were those of disgust and disappointment." The sinking of the ship was not unexinci-pected, and those on board had prepared to leave her some time before she finally went down. It was evident that she could not withstand the pressure which the second winter brought to bear upon her. The explorers in the Jeannette found few specimens, except bears, seals and walruses. During the summer it was difficult to get bears, as they took to the water readily and so cut off their pursuers. But sometimes they closely approached the ship, and one of them ventured half-way up the gang-plank, where killed. it was She groaned and shook in the ice. Α curious humming sound was audible: the deck-seams cracked. Iron bars sprang out of their sockets and danced like drum-sticks on the head of a drum. The ship lay over on her side, and it was as if she was shivering with an ague. Hummocks of ice were piled round her, and pressed closer and closer upon her. Then a crash was heard, and a man her occasion, a mother and two rushed up from below. "The ice is ed cautiously and wonderingly coming through the coal-bunkers!" he ship. A volley was fired into said. After the crash there was no sound the crew expected to bag all save the rush of the water; the ship was settling fast. The boats and provisions | others, Lieutenant Danenhauer and Dr. were transferred to the ice: she keeled over until the yard-arms were against the ice and the starboard rail was under water. "Just before the watch from our tent was called," Dr. Newcomb has written, "I heard a noise which must have been the ship as she went down. I looked out soon after and she was gone, her only requiem being the melancholy howl of a single dog. Only a few floating articles marked the place. "Insignificant as the Jeannette was in comparison with the ice, her disappearance made a great change in the scene. During her existence there was always something animated to turn to and look at, but now all was a dreary blank. The story of the retreat is now well known. A heavy gale overtook the three boats in which the party was divided, and during it they were separated. The crew of one boat including, among Newcomb, safely landed, after much suffering, at the mouth of the Lena River in Siberia. Capt. De Long's boat also succeeded in landing, but his party, with the exception of two seamen, died miserably while looking for succor. The third boat has not been heard from, but there is scarcely any doubt that she went down in the gale. Courage is always noble, and we cannot withhold our admiration from those who suffered so much and did their duty so bravely in the Arctic seas, but when we count the lives sacrificed and see the few survivors returned to us, one of them partially blind, the others more or less shattered in constitution, we wish the high qualities which are necessary in Arctic exploration could be used in fields where, though the perils may not be less, the recompense would be more adequate than it is ever likely to be at the longsought pole.— Youth's Companion. THE LOST ALTHOUGH now consisting of little else than barren rocks, mountains covered with snow and ice, and valleys covered with glaciers-although its coasts are now lined with floods of ice, and chequered with icebergs of immense size, Greenland was once easily accessible; its soil was fruitful, and well repaid the cultivation of the earth. It was discovered by the Scandinavians, towards the close of the tenth century, and a settlement was effected on the eastern coast, in the year 982, by a company of adventurers from Iceland, under command of Eric the Red. Emigrants flocked thither from Iceland and Norway, and the results of European enterprise and civilization appeared on different parts of the coast. A colony was established in Greenland, and it bid fair to go on and prosper. Voyages of exploration were projected in Greenland, and carried into effect by the hardy mariners of those days. Papers have been published by the | COLONY. Danish Antiquarian Society at Copenhagen, which go far to show that those bold navigators discovered the coast of Labrador, and proceeding to the south, fell in with the Island of Nowfoundland; continuing their course, they beheld the sandy shores of Cape Cod, centuries before the American continent was discovered by Christopher Columbus! It is even believed that these Scandinavian adventurers effected a settlement on the shores of what is now known as Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, and in consequence of the multitude of grapes which abounded in the woods, they called the new and fruitful country Vinland. But owing to the great number of hostile savages who inhabited these regions, the colonists, after some sanguinary skir. mishes, forsook the coast and returned to Greenland. The colony, however, continued to flourish, and the intercourse between it and the mother country was constant and regular. In the year 1400 it is said to THE LOST COLONY. have numbered one hundred and ninety villages, a bishopric, twelve parishes, and of pas Da lan COL A alo SO mc two monasteries. During this period four hundred years, vessels were Sing, at regular intervals, between the nish provinces in Europe and Green. But in the year 1406 this interrse was interrupted in a fatal manner. mighty wall arose, as if by magic, ng the coast, and the navigators who ght those shores could behold the untains in the distance, but could not efect a landing. During the greater part of the fifteenth, the whole of the siteenth and seventeenth centuries, Geenland was inaccessible to European navigators. The whole coast was blockaded by large masses and islands of ice, which had been drifting from the north for years, and which at length chilled the waters of the coast, and changed the temperature of the atmosphere, and presented an impassable barrier to the entrance in their ports of friend or foe. The sea, at the distance of miles from the land, was frozen to a The colony of Greenland, after this on various parts of the coast; and also By 287 have been discovered, and we can only speculate upon their fate. It would require no vivid fancy to imagine the appalling sense of destitution which blanched the features and chilled the hearts of those unhappy colonists when they began to realize their forlorn condition; when the cold rapidly increased, and their harbors became permanently blocked with enormous icebergs, and the genial rays of the sun were obscured by fogs; when the winters became for the first time intensely rigid, cheerless and dreary; when the summers were also cold and the soil unproductive; when the mountains, no longer crowned with forests, were covered with snow and ice throughout the year, and the valleys filled with glaciers; when the wonted inhabitants of the woods and waters were destroyed or exiled by the severity of the weather, and their places perhaps supplied by monsters of huge and frightful character. It were easy to follow this people in fancy to their dwellings; to see them sad, spiritless and despairing, while conscious of their imprisoned and cheerless condition, and impending fate; to watch them as their numbers gradually diminish through the combined influence of want and continual suffering; to behold them struggling for existence, and striving, nobly striving, to adapt their constitutions, their habits, their feelings, and their wants, to their strangely changed circumstances, but all in vain; to behold them gazing from their icy cliffs, with straining eyes, to the eastward, towards that quarter of the globe, so far distant, where their friends and relations reside, in a more genial clime, surrounded with all the blessings of life, but compelled to rest their eyes on a vast, dreary, and monotonous sea of ice, a mass of frozen waves, surrounding myriads of icebergs, extending to the utmost limit of their vision. Fancy might even go farther than this, and portray the last of these unhappy saries, who have braved hard- colonists, who had lingered on the stage sionaries, Perils to introduce among the of life until he had seen all of his com al inhabitants the blessings of panions, all, of each sex and every age, tion and Christianity. No other of those early European settlers die a miserable death, the prey of want and despair. Poets have described, in lines of beauty and sublimity, the horrors which may be supposed to surround "the last man;" but there seems to be a remoteness, and indeed an air of improbability about the subject, which robs it of half its force and majesty. But here is an event which has actually occurred, and worthy of being commemorated by the ablest pen in the land. Here, indeed, we may imagine, without offending probability, the wild horrors, invading the very temple of reason, and accumulating, until madness takes possession of the mind. Here we may look for the reality of the fanciful picture, presented with so much terrible distinctness by poets. John S. Sleeper. GIRL AND EMPRESS. THE Princess Dagmar, as the Empress of Russia, is still called in the land of her birth, grew up with her sister Alexandra, now the Princess of Wales, at the Danish Court with very modest surroundings. The Queen was an excellent mother, and sought to develop in her daughters the woman in preference to the princess. It used to be said at the capital that the princesses were made to help in making their own dresses, and that the furniture in their common bed room was covered with inexpensive calico. A story of the näive admiration expressed by Princess Dagmar on being shown the wedding trousseau of one of the noble ladies at court, and her longing wonder whether she would ever herself own "such handsome things," was told with a touch of sympathetic pride by the people of Copenhagen, with whom the two princesses were great favorites. Dagmar had won her way deepest into the people's heart, however. Her sweet disposition, the winning grace of her manner, and the perfect freedom with which she, like her sisters (and indeed the whole royal family), moved among all classes of the people were well calculated to gain for her an affection, which followed her to her new home, and found expression at her wedding in a score of ways that touched the heart of the princess profoundly. At every subsequent appearance at her father's court, she was received by the people with an enthusiasm that even embraced her husband, despite the rumors of his sinister charac ter and violent temper, that from the beginning had threatened to make the match an unpopular one. The Czarowitz apparently took kindly to this popu larity, and when at Copenhagen mingled freely with the populace. His bluff, soldierly way soon found favor, and when Dagmar's children, in little kilted suits and with dark hair "banged" over their foreheads, began to be seen about the park, at Fredericksborg, "grandpapa's" summer palace, the reconciliation to the foreigner was complete. One of the causes that contributed to the popularity of the Princess Dagmar was, perhaps, her name. Her father had wisely given to all his children, except Alexandra, old historical Danish names. identified with the past of the nation. Frederick Christian, Valdemar, and Thyra, are all names that hold a high place in Danish history, and live in its songs and traditions. But of all the nation's great names, none is dearer to the heart of the Danish people than that of Dagmar, the Queen of the victorious Valdemar, and the friend of the needy and oppressed throughout the land, whose goodness was so great that on her untimely death-bed, according to tradition, no greater sin weighed upon her conscience than sewing a lace sleeve on Sunday. The people of Copenhagen, among whom the Princess Dagmar moved, liked to compare her virtues with those of the beloved Queen, and, at her departure for her Russian home, the fervent wish followed her that she would prove in truth a veritable Dagmar--a "harbinger of day" to the unhappy people whose Empress she was some day to become. The Princess Dagmar was not a handsome child, her features being clumsy though pleasing; but she grew into a very beautiful woman, like her sister Alexandra. In every print-shop in Copenhagen, pictures of her and her husband, with their children, are for sale. The children have little of their mother's looks, but bear a strong resemblance to their father.-Selected. |