p. 21: Young Midshipman Robert Hood is unaccustomed to both the nightly ‘dismal serenade’ of the ‘cowardly, stupid and ravenous’ sled dogs and to the lazy winter lives of the traders, ‘few of [whom] have books, and the incidents of their lives do not furnish much subject for thought.’ Hood decides: ‘in such a state one might be disposed to envy the half year’s slumber of the bears.’
David H. Stam's Anthologies of the Reading Experience