The man had too much of “cold without,”

And the lady sighed for her tippet and muff;

For though they had come by a summary route,

The weather, they found, was wintry enough.

When they climbed an iceberg’s loftiest height,

To the imminent danger of dresses and hoops,

Of ribbons and pins, and laces and loops,

The Grinnell Expedition was in sight.

Now the lady had been prepared to preach,

Or rather, to make a nice serious speech;

But it might as well have been written in Dutch for her,

For the wind and the weather, conspiring together,

Turned out to be, altogether too much for her;

One half she forgot, and she bungled the rest of it,

Though I finally managed to pick out the best of it.

She asked her companion, who stood in the lee of her,

For the wind spread her skirts to the bigness of three of her,

“Who sent these ships to the rescue of those,

Who have perilled their lives in these Northern snows?

Did he spring from the mob, the benevolent ‘masses,’

 Prev. P 15/19 next