Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 1/Chips’s ghost story

CHIPS'S GHOST STORY.
We were running so far south that the sailors said in jest that the skipper intended to circumnavigate the Pole. A snow-drift three feet deep often lay upon the lee side of the quarter-deck; big icicles bristled, bayonet-like, beneath the gallows and even ruffed the galley; hot water had to be poured upon the blocks before the iron rod-like ropes and fast-jammed sheeves would move. Far into the morning a dull dusk continued; the day was but a twilight; the stars came out at three. An ice -watch had been set, for a huge berg, more than a mile long and some seven or eight hundred feet high, had passed us at noon in very disagreeable propinquity. The sight of that dismal Delos sullenly surging on the leaden waves—lit by a few shivering sunbeams from a patch of cold yellow in the leaden sky—had cast a chill upon our spirits, too. It wasn't pleasant to remember, as the brief day waned, that we might be running right on to a similar monster slowly coming up to meet us. No songs were sung that night at the little club, which a few of us had got up in the second mate's cabin. He lay smoking within his bunk, determined to be warm as long as he could, and dreading the ap

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