'Floundering through deep snow drifts'. From 'Giant of the north,
or, Pokings around the pole', by Robert Michael Ballantyne (London, 1882).
[NLS reference: Wordie.524].
Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894) was a Scottish juvenile fiction writer. As a young man he worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Later he drew on his experiences of the Canadian far north to write this book.
'Giant of the north' is one of the many books relating to polar exploration in the James Mann Wordie collection at the National Library of Scotland.
The book shows how Wordie was unusual as a book collector at the time in buying not just fiction but also children's fiction, to add to his extensive polar library.