CHAP. II.]           GREAT GLACIER.                    25
gested by motions that he intended to hang the coin from his nose!
We pitched our camp in an open space from which the snow had melted, on the flat of land extending for several miles below the glacier. On the next morning (24th April) after our simple repast, and one pipe, I left Tellot in camp to look after the traps, as he was unwilling to take any more trouble, and struggled up by myself to the base of the glacier, a distance of about two and a half miles, through very deep, but rotten and thawing snow. The flat was strewed with boulders and drift-wood, with here and there a sand-bar, and covered with snow so soft, that I frequently slipped in between masses of rock up to my chest, or higher, and occasionally jerked down, without any warning, into a streamlet that had undermined it. The streams were large and swift; one of them in fact was a small river, tQo deep and strong to be waded. Pine and alder woods enclosed this open space on either side.
On reaching the glacier, its presence was rendered very obvious, by the cracking of the ice, and the careering of the stones from its surface. This was incessant; now a shower of pebbles, now a few hundredweight of boulders, and now a thimbleful of sand, but always something coming over. The ice-very evidently such, at the cracks where you saw its true colour, and its dripping lower edges of stalactite formyet appeared for the most part like wet smooth rock, from
men and natives of the coast) simply means an Englishman, and was originated by the fact that our first acquaintance with them was made in the Georgian era. "Boston man," or "Boston" simply, stands for an American; the first vessels bearing the stars and stripes, hailed from that port.