him the moment he put his head in at the cabin door. I well remember one morning when he came to fetch something before I had got up. He turned the button while still in the doorway and began to chat with me; but I saw where his eyes fell, and where his thoughts were.

Under the picture was a bench, a sofa by day, a bed by night. Here were no soft spring mattrasses, only a stuffed pallet with a pair of warm blankets and a single very meagre pillow. But how sound one could sleep on this simple couch-that is to say, when the Fram was not rolling so as to land one on the floor every now and then.

For the Fram could roll, at any rate before the cargo was shifted in the Nærösund.

Scott Hansen declared that she had described an angle of forty-six degrees in a heavy sea off Lister. It must have been an uncomfortable night; the whole forward deck was deep in water, so that the deck cargo was washing about from one side to the other, and at last there was nothing for it but to throw overboard a number of paraffin barrels. Fortunately they were only empty barrels intended for preserving the skins of bears, seals, walruses, and other game; and there were plenty of them left. Even while I was on board the Fram, she rolled a good deal one night, although it was not blowing particularly hard, and the sea did not run very high-indeed, there was only a long swell. In crossing the Vestfiord, on the other hand, when it was blowing quite fresh, the ship was as steady as a rock the moment she was under full sail. She was, indeed, a strange, a unique vessel. Sverdrup, who, as a rule, said little enough, could not help now and then giving expression to his affectionate surprise in a subdued 'She's a rare little craft, and no mistake!'

But to return to Nansen's cabin. On one side of the end wall was a cupboard containing the cash-box, papers, diaries, &c., the key of which was in Nansen's own keeping; on the other side, near the head of the bed or sofa, was a bookcase with a rich selection of literature of many kinds. Numbers of books had been presented to the Fram by Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish publishers and others. The tolerably extensive library thus formed was always at the disposal of the crew. Besides, the doctor had his own medical library in his cabin, and Scott Hansen kept a collection of books, mainly meteorological and astronomical, along with the charts in the chart room. But Nansen had picked out for his own use a number of books which he kept in his cabin. They were for the most part, of course, geographical, geological, zoological, and other scientific works, but with a fair sprinkling of imaginative literature and philosophy. Ibsen and Biörnson, Vinje, Jonas Lie, Runeberg, and others were represented, some of them by their complete works; and here too were Tennyson, Keats, Byron, Frauenstedt's Schopenhauer, &c.—in short, an ample stock of reading even for the long night of the polar winter.

When I entered on my short occupation of the cabin, the greater part of these books lay in a chaos on the floor, along with all sorts of other things; so I took it upon myself to arrange them according to subject in the bookcase, and I made free use of this library while I was on board. This evening, for instance, when I lay down on the sofa after

I noted the following titles: A. Geikie, Textbook of Geology; E. Suess, Antlitz der Erde; A. Heim, Gletscherkunde; K. A. Zittel, Handbuch der Paläontologie; Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle; Müller, Unter den Tungusen und Jakuten; v. Richthofen, Führer für Forschungsreisende; Neumayer, Anleitung zu wissenschaftlichen Beobachtungen auf Reisen; Vegaexpeditionens vetenskapliga rakttagelser, &c.

supper, I opened the first book that came to hand, and found it to be Nansen's How can the North Polar Region be Crossed? -containing his lecture before the Royal Geographical Society, and all the objections of the celebrated English sailors. It was the first time I had seen it. It made a peculiar and moving impression upon me as I read it here in Nansen's own cabin.

When I had done, I felt I must go up and see him. Until that moment I had not quite grasped and realised the significance of his enterprise. He himself was always so easy and unpretending, and on board the Fram everything took its daily course with such a total absence of solemnity, that I had, as it were, lost the sensation of there being anything unusual in this voyage. To cross Greenland, to start for the North Pole, to go to the end of the world, seemed no more to these men than a trip down Christiania fiord to the ordinary mortal.

I could hear Juell's quick tongue, in the saloon, supplying a running commentary to one of the doctor's stories; on the deck some one was rumbling a beer-barrel along; the piston kept up its regular throb, and the propeller its vibration, while the Fram clove its way foot by foot through the sea, slowly but surely-as though driven by some natural law ever onward and onward towards the unknown goal.

Nansen had lent me a camel's-fur jacket while I was on board; it was so cosy and warm that it seemed to put my skin into a positive glow when I had it on. Thank Heaven, I thought, he need certainly neither starve nor freeze so long as the Fram holds together.

But if the Fram should be crushed, as one of the English admirals prophesied ?

6

Then we'll take to our longboat,' Nansen had answered.

The boats are too big and heavy,' another admiral had objected.

'We have five or six smaller boats with us,' was Nansen's reply, and if the worst comes to the worst, we'll get along on an ice floe; I've done it before."

Up the

Yes, I felt I must see him and express my affection for him in the little time we could still be together. companion, past the steaming galley, out into the free air of heaven!

There the Fram lay, heaving gently in the full glory of the summer night. We had at last drawn near the peaks of Hammerö, so that we could see their green-clad base. Before us stretched all the mountains of the mainland, those nearest bathed in a splendid purple glow, while further ahead they passed through all gradations of subdued colour from tender violet to deep grey, right down to the edge of the crisp blue-black sea.

It was strangely still. Not a soul was to be seen on the deck, forward, and when I looked aft, to the southward, I saw nothing but sky and sea. The solemn silence of the summer night took such hold on my mind that I remained leaning on the bulwarks for a long time, watching the plash of the waves against the ship's side, before I went up to him.

There suddenly flashed upon me the recollection of a little ragged urchin whom I had seen a few days before on the beach near Trondhjem while I was waiting for the Fram. He was going barefoot in the sand, dirty and unkempt, but beaming with health and contentment, and singing at the top of his voice, 'Jeg gaar i fare, hvor jeg gaar!' 1

Then the thought of my own confirmation came upon

1

'I go in danger wherever I go '-the first line of a hymn.

me, when I sat in the church and shouted with all the rest,

6

Jeg gaar i fare, hvor jeg gaar!' and heard the mighty organharmonies throbbing under the vaulted roof as though they indeed represented the wrath of the Lord.

Some one came along the deck whistling a merry tune; it was the light-hearted Petterson, stripped to the waist in the chill evening wind, carrying

a basin and a towel and preparing to wash the grime of the engine-room off his face and body. He had been in the Polar Sea before, on board the llertha, so that he was at home in these waters. What a splendidly modelled back! How fine the play of the muscles in his arms! Yes indeed, such frames as this seemed built for a tussle with the darkness and the fog and the cold and the ice. His whole personality was set to a very different air from that which was running in my head. Every line of it seemed to sing:

PETTERSON

Vær glad naar faren veier
hver evne, som du eier!"1

and from all his comrades around, from the man who stood at the helm, from those who were stoking the furnace, from all who now lay sleeping in their bunks, it seemed as though the third line came chiming in triumphantly:

1 .

'Og desto större seier!' 2

Rejoice, when danger puts to the test every faculty you possess.' 2. And so much greater the victory.'