THE WORLD OF ICE. 25

But Captain Ellice could not be induced to resume
the command of his old ship, or voyage again to the
West Indies. He determined to change the scene of
his future labours and sail to the Frozen Seas, where
the aspect of every object, even the ocean itself,
would be very unlikely to recall the circumstances of
his loss,

Some time after his recovery, Captain Ellice pur-
chased a brig and fitted her out as a whaler, deter-
mined to try his fortune in the Northern Seas. Fred
pleaded hard to be taken out, but his father felt
that he had more need to go to school than to sea ;
so he refused, and Fred, after sighing very deeply
once or twice, gave in with a good grace. Buzzby,
too, who stuck to his old commander like a leech, was
equally anxious to go; but Buzzby, in a sudden and
unaccountable fit of tenderness, had, just two months
before, married a wife, who might be appropriately
deseribed as “fat, fair, and forty,” and Buzzby’s wife
absolutely forbade him to go. Alas! Buzzby was
no longer his own master. At the age of forty-five
he became

 

as he himself expressed it—an abject
slave, and he would as soon have tried to steer in
a slipper-bath right in the teeth of an equinoctial
hurricane, as have opposed the will of his wife. He
used to sigh grufily when spoken to on this subject,
and compare himself to a Dutch galliot that made
more leeway than headway, even with a wind on
the quarter. “Once,” he would remark, “I was
clipper-built, and could sail right in the wind’s eye;