"We felt now that, whatever else might happen to us, we could not want for food, as, besides the eggs, we could have as many ducks as we pleased to catch. We had succeeded in making a fire, and had abundant means to keep it burning. There were only two things that seriously troubled us. One was our lack of shelter, if a storm should come; and the other, our lack of proper clothing, if the weather should grow cold. But, having succeeded so well thus far, we were very hopeful for the future. Heaven had kindly favored us. The temperature had been very mild all the time. There had been no wind, and scarcely a cloud to obscure the sky. As for shelter, we felt that we could manage in two days to enclose the cave; and as to the other trouble, although we were not very clear in our minds about it, yet we did not lose confidence that a ship would come along and take us off before winter should set in. So we resolved not to abandon our vigilance, but to keep up a constant watch, as we had done before. Now that we had made a fire, we knew the smoke would be a great help to us in drawing the attention of the people on board any ship that might come near.

"With these agreeable reflections we went to work much more cheerfully than we had done before."

* * * * *

The captain here "hove to," as he said, observing, that, the day being far spent, he would drop the story for the present. "To-morrow, when you come, I will tell you how we fixed up the cave, and made ourselves more comfortable in many ways. Meanwhile you can reflect upon what I have told you, and you can answer me then whether you think John Hardy and Richard Dean were an enviable pair of boys."

"I can answer that now," said William.

"Well, what is the answer?" asked the Captain, in great good-humor.

"Why, their pluck and courage everybody would envy, or at least they ought to; but, for the rest, I would rather stay at home."

"Well, well," said the Captain, smiling pleasantly, "each to his taste. I rather think I should prefer being in the 'Mariner's Rest' myself";—saying which he led the way into the grounds in front of the cottage which he loved so well, where he took leave of his little friends once more, making them promise over and over again (for which there was no need at all) that they would come next day and hear about the cave, and how they there built themselves a shelter from the Arctic storms.



CHAPTER XI.

In which the little People are convinced of the Goodness of Providence, as the Reader ought to be,—seeing that to be cast away is not to be forsaken.



We have now for some time followed the old man through the recital of the wonderful adventures which befell himself and the Dean on the lonely little island in the Arctic Sea; and we have watched the children going and coming from day to day. And we have seen, too, how happy the children were when listening to the story, and how delighted they were with every little scrap they got of it, and how they remembered every word of it, and how William wrote it down in black and white, and had it safe and sound for future use,—little dreaming, at the time of doing it, that the record he was keeping would find its way at last into a book, and thus give other children than himself and Fred and Alice a chance to make the acquaintance of the good old Captain and the brave and handsome little Dean.

And William Earnest kept his record regularly, and he kept it well, as we have seen before; and up to this point of time everything was set down with day and date. But now a change had clearly come over the habits of our little party. At first, as has been hitherto related, the old Captain was a little shy of the children, though he so much liked them; but now all formality was gone between them, and so down the children came to the Captain's cottage whenever they had a mind. The Captain was always glad to see them, be it morning, noon, or evening; and never were the children, in all their lives before, so happy as when romping through the Captain's grounds, or cooling themselves upon the grass beneath the Captain's trees, or looking at the Captain's "traps" or joking with that oddest boy that was ever seen, Main Brace, or playing with the Captain's dogs,—the biggest dogs that ever bore the odd names of Port and Starboard.

The Captain now said, "Make yourselves at home, my dears,—quite at home"; and the children did it; and the Captain always went about whatever he had to do until he was ready once more to begin his story-telling; and then they would all rush off to the yacht, or to the "Crow's Nest," or the "cabin," or the "quarter-deck," or some other pleasant place; and as the Captain related something more and more extraordinary, as it seemed to them, each time,

"the wonder grew That one small head should carry all he knew";

while, as for the old man himself, he might well exclaim, with the lover in the play, "I were but little happy if I could say how much."

Thus it came about, as we have good reason to suppose, that days and dates were lost in William's journal; and thus it was that the young and truthful chronicler of this veritable history simply wrote down, from time to time, what the Captain said, without mentioning much about when it was that the Captain said it. Sometimes he wrote with lead pencil, sometimes with pen and ink, and often, as is plain to see from the manuscript itself, at considerable intervals of time; but always, as there is no doubt, with accuracy; for William's mind, touching the Captain's adventures, was like the susceptible heart of the Count in the Venetian story, "wax to receive and marble to retain."

So now, after this long explanation, the reader will perceive that we can do nothing else than report the Captain's story, without always saying where the little party were seated at the time the Captain told it. And, in truth, it matters little; at least so William thought, for he wrote one day upon the page,—

"Where's the use, I'd like to know, putting in what Fred and me and Alice did, and where we went with the 'ancient mariner'; I haven't time to write so much, and I'll only write what the Captain said"; and so right away he set down what follows.

* * * * *

"Now you see," resumed the Captain, "when we had done all I told you of before,—having slept, you know, and got well rested,—we went about our work very hopefully. But as we were going along, meditating on our plans, the Dean stopped suddenly, and said he to me: 'Hardy, do you know what day it is?'

"'No,' said I, 'upon my word I don't, and never once thought about it!'

"The Dean looked very sad all at once, and, not being able to see why that should be, I asked what difference it made to us what day it was.

"'Why, a great deal of difference,' said the Dean.

"'How?' said I.

"'Why,' said the Dean, 'when shall we know when Sunday comes?'

"To be sure, how should we know when Sunday came! I had not thought of that before; but the Dean was differently brought up from me; for, while I had not been taught to care much about such matters, the Dean had, and he looked upon Sunday as a day when nobody should do any sort of work. I believe the Dean had an idea in his head, that, if it was Sunday, and he was frozen half to death already, or starved about as badly, and should refuse to work to save himself from death outright, he would do a virtuous thing in sacrificing himself, and would go straight up to heaven for certain. So I became anxious too, and for the Dean's sake, if not for my own, I tried hard to recall what day it was."

"How very queer," said William, "to forget what day it was! How did it happen? Won't you tell us that, Captain Hardy?"

"To be sure," said the obliging Captain,—"as well as I can, that is. Now, do you remember what I told you the other day about the sun shining all the time,—do you remember that, my lad?"

"Yes," answered William, "of course I do. Goes round and round, that way," and he whirled his hat about his head.

"Just so," went on the Captain,—"just so, exactly. Goes round and round, and never sets until the winter comes, and then it goes down, and there it stays all the winter through, and there is constant darkness where the daylight always was before."

"What, all the time?" asked William.

"Yes," replied the Captain; "dark all the time."

"How dark?" asked Fred.

"Dark as dark can be. Dark at morning and at evening. Dark at noon, and dark at midnight. Dark all the time, as I have said. Dark all the winter through. Dark for months and months."

"How dreadful!" exclaimed Fred.

"Dreadful enough, as I can assure you, with no light, all the whole winter-time, except the moon and stars. A dreadful thing to live along for days and days, and weeks and weeks, and months and months, without the blessed light of day,—without once seeing the sun come up and brighten everything and make us glad, and the pretty flowers to unfold themselves, and all the living world praise the Lord for remembering it. That's what you never see in all the Arctic winter,—no sunshine ever streaming up above the hills and making all the rainbow colors in the clouds. That's what you never see at all, no more than if you were blind and couldn't see.

"But never mind just now about the winter. We haven't done with the summer yet, nor with Sunday either, for that matter.

"As I have said before, the loss of Sunday much grieved the Dean. So, you see, we had nothing else to do but make one on our own account."

"What, make a Sunday!" exclaimed William. "I've heard of people making almost everything, even building castles in the air; but I never heard before of anybody putting up a Sunday."

"Well, you see, we did the best we could. It is not at all surprising that we should have lost our reckoning in this way, seeing that the sun was shining, as I have told you, all the time; and we worked and slept without much regard to whether the hours of night or day were on us. So we had good reason for a little mixing up of dates. In fact we could neither of us very well recall the day of the month that we were cast away. It was somewhere near the end of June, that we knew; but the exact day we could not tell for certain. We remembered the day of the week well enough, and it was Tuesday; but more than this we could not get into our heads; and so it seemed that there was nothing for us but to sink all days into the one long day of the Arctic summer, and nevermore know whether it was Sunday, or Monday, or Friday, or what day it was of any month; and if it should be Heaven's will that we should live on upon the island until the New Year came round, and still other years should come and go, we should never know New Year's day.

"But, as I was saying, about making a Sunday for ourselves. I did everything I could to refresh my memory about it. I counted up the number of times we had slept, and the number of times we had worked, and recalled the day when I first walked around the island; and I tried my best to connect all those events together in such a way as to prove how often the sun had passed behind the cliffs, and how often it had shone upon us; and thus I made out that the very day I am telling you about proved to be Sunday,—at least I so convinced the Dean, and he was satisfied. And that's the way we made a Sunday for ourselves.

"So we resolved to do no work that day; and this was well, for we were very weary and needed rest.

"I need not tell you that we passed the time in talking over our plans for the future, and in discussing the prospects ahead of us, and arranging what we should do. You see we had settled about Sunday, so that was off our minds; and after recalling many things which had happened to us, and things which had been done on the Blackbird, we finally concluded that we had found out the day of the month, and so we called the day 'Sunday, the second of July,' and this we marked, as I will show you, thus: On the top of a large flat rock near by I placed a small white stone, and this we called our 'Sunday stone'; and then, in a row with this stone, we placed six other stones, which we called by the other days of the week. Then I moved the white stone out of line a little, which was to show that Sunday had passed, and afterwards, when the next day had gone, we did the same with the Monday stone, and so on until the stones were all on a line again, when we knew that it was once more Sunday. Of course we knew when the day was gone, by the sun being around on the north side of the island, throwing the shadow of the cliffs upon us.

"For noting the days of the month we made a similar arrangement to that which we had made for the days of the week; and thus you see we had now got an almanac among other things.

"'And now,' said the Dean, 'let us put all this down for fear we forget it.' So away the little fellow ran and gathered a great quantity of small pebbles, and these we arranged on the top of the rock so as to form letters; and the letters that we thus made spelled out

'JOHN HARDY AND RICHARD DEAN, CAST AWAY IN THE COLD, TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 1824.'

"Now, when we came to look ahead, and to speculate upon what was likely to befall us, we saw that we had two months of summer still remaining; and, as midsummer had hardly come yet, we knew that we were likely to have it warmer than before, and we had now no further fears about being able to live through that period. In these two months it was plain that one of two things must happen,—a ship must come along and take us off, or we must be prepared for the dark time that must follow after the sun should go down for the winter; otherwise a third thing would certainly happen, that is, we should both die,—an event which did not, in any case, seem at all unlikely; so we pledged ourselves to stand by each other through every fortune, each helping the other all he could. At any rate, we would not lose hope, and never despair of being saved, through the mercy of Providence, somehow or other.

"Having reached this resigned state of mind, we were ready to consider rationally what we had to do. It was clear enough that, if we only looked out for a ship to save us, and that chance should in the end fail, we would be ill prepared for the winter if we were left on the island to encounter its perils. Therefore it was necessary to be ready for the worst, and accordingly, after a little deliberation, we concluded to proceed as follows:—

"1st. We would construct a place to shelter ourselves from the cold and storms. (In this we had made some satisfactory progress already.)

"2d. We would collect all the food we could while there was opportunity.

"3d. We would gather fuel, of which, as had been already proved, there was Andromeda (or fire-plant) and moss and blubber to depend upon. Of this latter the dead narwhal and seal would furnish us a moderate supply; but for the rest we must rely upon our own skill to capture some other animals from the sea; though, as to how this was to be done, we had to own ourselves completely at fault.

"4th. We would in some manner secure for ourselves warmer clothing, otherwise we would certainly freeze; and here we were completely at fault too.

"5th. We would contrive in some way to make for ourselves a lamp, as we could never live in our cave in darkness; and here was a difficulty apparently even more insurmountable than the others,—as much so as appeared the making of a fire in the first instance,—for while we had a general idea that we might capture some seals, and get thus a good supply of oil, and that we might also get plenty of fox-skins for clothing, yet neither of us could think of any way to make a lamp.

"When we came thus to bring ourselves to view the situation, the prospect might have caused stouter hearts than ours to fear; but, as we had seen before, nothing was to be gained by lamentation, so we put a bold front on, firmly resolved to make the best fight we could."

* * * * *

"A poor chance for you, I should think," said Fred, "and I don't see how you ever lived through so many troubles,"—while little Alice declared her opinion that "the poor Dean must have died anyway."

"A very bad prospect, indeed, my dears," continued the Captain,—"very bad, I can assure you; but as it is a poor rule to read the last page of a book before you read the rest of it, so we will go right on to the end with our story, and then you will find out what became of the Dean, as well as what happened to myself.

"Well, as I was going to say, when Monday came, we set about our work, not exactly in the order which I have named, but as we found most convenient; and as day after day followed each other through the week, and as one week followed after another week, we found ourselves at one time building up the wall in front of the cave, then catching ducks and gathering eggs, then collecting the fire-plant, and then throwing moss up on the rocks to dry, and then cutting off the blubber and skins of the dead seal and narwhal.

"All of these things were carefully secured; and in a sort of cave, much like the one we were preparing for our abode, only larger, we stowed away all the fire-plant and dried moss that we could get. Then we looked about us to see what we should do for a place to put our blubber in,—that is, you know, the fat we got off the dead narwhal and the seal, and also any other blubber that we might get afterwards.

"When we had cut all the blubber off the seal and narwhal, we found that we had an enormous heap of it,—as much, at least, in quantity, as five good barrels full,—and, since the sun was very warm, there was great danger, not only that it would spoil, but that much of it would melt and run away. Fortunately, very near our hut there was a small glacier hanging on the hillside, coming down a narrow valley from a greater mass of ice which lay above. From the face of this glacier a great many lumps of ice had broken off, and there were also deep banks of snow which the summer's sun had not melted.

"In the midst of this accumulation of ice and snow we had little difficulty in making, partly by excavating and partly by building up, a sort of cave, large enough to hold twice as much blubber as we had to put into it. Here we deposited our treasure, which was our only reliance for light in case we invented a lamp, and our chief reliance for fire if the winter should come and find us still upon the island.

"After we had thus secured, in this snow-and-ice cave, our stock of blubber, we constructed another much like it near by for our food, and into this we had soon gathered a pretty large stock of ducks and eggs.



"When we contemplated all that we had done in this particular, you may be sure our spirits rose very much."

"Odd, wasn't it?" said Fred, "having a storehouse made of ice and snow. But, Captain Hardy, if you'll excuse me for interrupting you, what did this glacier that you spoke about look like? and what was it anyway?"

"A glacier is nothing more," replied the Captain, "than a stream of ice made out of snow partly melted and then frozen again, and which, forming, as I have said before, high up on the tops of the hills, runs down a valley and breaks off at its end and melts away. Sometimes it is very large,—miles across,—and goes all the way down to the sea; and the pieces that break off from it are of immense size, and are called icebergs. Sometimes the glaciers are very small, especially on small islands such as ours was. This little glacier I tell you of lay in a narrow valley, as I said before; and, as the cliffs were very high on either side, it was almost always in shadow, and the air was very cold there; so you see how fortunate it was that we thought of fixing upon that place for our storehouses. Then another great advantage to us was, that it was so near our hut,—being within sight, and only a few steps across some rough rocks; but among these rocks we contrived, in course of time, to make, by filling in with small stones, a pretty smooth walk.

"As we caught and put away the ducks in our storehouse, we began at length to preserve their skins. At first we could see no value in them, and threw them away; but we imagined at length that, in case we could not catch the foxes, they would serve to make us some sort of clothing, while out of the seal-skin which I mentioned before we could make boots, if we only had anything to sew with.

"Thus one difficulty after another continued to beset us; but this last one was soon partly overcome, for the Dean, on the very first day of our landing, discovered that he had in his pocket his palm and needle, carrying it always about him when on shipboard, like any other good sailor; but we lacked thread."

"What is a palm and needle, Captain Hardy?" inquired William.

"A palm," answered the Captain, "is a band of leather going around the hand, with a thimble fitted into it where it comes across the root of the thumb. The sailor's needle differs only from the common one in being longer and three-cornered, instead of round. It is used for sewing sails and other coarse work on shipboard. The needle is held between the thumb and forefinger, and is pushed through with the thimble in the palm of the hand, and hence the name.

"To come back to our story (having, as I hope, made the palm and needle question clear to you), let me ask you to remember that I told you, when I landed on the island, I had four things,—that is:—

"1st. My life;

"2d. The clothes on my back;

"3d. A jack-knife; and

"4th. The mercy of Providence.

"But now, you see, I had added a fifth article to that list, in the Dean's needle; and I might also say that I had a sixth one, too, in the Dean himself, which I did not dare enumerate in the list at first, as I felt pretty sure that the Dean was going to die, or at least wake up crazy.

"But you see a sailor's palm and needle could be of very little use unless we had some thread, of which we did not possess a single particle, except the small piece that was in the needle, and by which it was tied to the palm. It was a good while before we obtained anything to make thread of, so we will pass that subject by for the present, and come back to what we had more immediately in hand. This was the preparation of our cave, or rather, as we had better say, hut,—that being more nearly what it was.

"The building of our hut, then, was indeed a very difficult task, as the solid wall we had to construct in front was much higher than our heads, and in this wall we had, of course, to leave a doorway and a window, besides a sort of chimney, or outlet, for the smoke from the fireplace, which was beside the door.

"We must have been at least two weeks making this wall, for we had not only to construct the wall itself, but when it got so high that we could no longer reach up to the top, we had to build steps, that we might climb there. We left a window above the doorway, not thinking, of course, to find any glass to put in it, but leaving it rather as a ventilator than a window. It was very small, not more than a foot square, and was easily shut up at any time, if we should not need it. For a door, we used a piece of the narwhal skin. This skin was fastened above the doorway with pegs, which we made of bones, driving them into the cracks between the stones, thus letting the skin fall down over the doorway like a curtain.

"In making the wall, we were greatly helped by the bones which I had found down on the beach, as they were much lighter than the stones, and aided in holding the moss in its place, so that we were able to use much more of that material than we otherwise should have been. When the wall was completed, we were gratified to see how tight it was, and how perfectly we had made it fit the rocks by means of the moss.

"Having completed the wall, our next concern was to arrange the interior; but about this we had no need to be in so great a hurry as with the wall, for we had now a place to shelter us from any storm that might come, and we could hope to make ourselves somewhat comfortable there, even although the inside was not well fitted up; for we had a fireplace, and could do our cooking without going outside. When we found how perfect was the draft through the outlet, or chimney, you may be very sure we were greatly delighted.

"As it fell out, we had secured this shelter in the very nick of time, for in two days afterwards a violent storm arose,—a heavy wind with hail and gusts of snow,—a strange kind of weather, you will think, for the middle of July. This storm made havoc with the ice on the east side of the island, breaking it up, and driving it out over the sea to the westward, filling the sea up so much in that direction, that there was no use, for the present at least, in looking for ships, as none could come near us. The storm made a very wild and fearful spectacle of the sea, as the waves went dashing over the pieces of ice and against the icebergs. When I looked out upon this scene, and listened to the noises made by the waves and the crushing ice, and heard the roaring wind, I wondered more than ever what could possess anybody to go to such a sea in a ship, for it seemed to me that the largest possible gains would not be a sufficient reward for the dangers to be encountered.

"But so it always was, and always will be, I suppose. Whenever there is a little money to be made, men will encounter any kind of hazard in order to get it. Thus the risks in going after whales and seals for their blubber, which is very valuable, are great; but then, if the ship makes a good voyage, the profits are very large, and when the sailors receive their 'lay,' that is, their share of the profits on the oil and whalebone which have been taken, it sometimes amounts to quite a handsome sum of money to each, and they consider themselves well rewarded for all their privations and hardships. And it must be owned that the whalers and sealers are a very brave sort of men, especially the whalers who go among the ice; for besides the dangers to the vessel, and the danger always encountered in approaching a whale to harpoon him (for, as you must know, he sometimes knocks the boat to pieces with his monstrous tail, and spills all the crew out in the water), he may, while swimming off with the harpoon in him, and dragging the boat by the line which is fast to it, take it into his head to rush beneath the ice, and thus destroy the boat and drown the people.

"But this is too long a falling to 'leeward' of our story, as the sailors would call it; so we will come right back into the wind again.

"When the weather cleared off after the storm, we went to work as before. But everything about looked gloomy enough. The cliffs were besprinkled with snow, and about the rocks the snow had drifted, and it lay in streaks where it had been carried by the wind. The sea was still very rough, and, as there were many immense pieces of ice upon the water, when the waves rose and fell, the pounding of it on the rocks made a most fearful sound.

"The sun coming out warm, however, soon melted the snow, and, getting heated up with work, we got on bravely. Indeed, we soon became not less surprised at the rapid progress we were making than at the facility with which we accommodated ourselves to our strange condition of life, and even grew cheerful under what would seem a state of the greatest possible distress. Thus you observe how perfectly we may reconcile ourselves to any fate, if we have but a resolute will, and the fear of God in our hearts. I do not mean to boast about the Dean and myself: but I think it must be owned that we kept up our courage pretty well, all things considered,—now, don't you think so, my dears?"

"To be sure we do," replied William. "And if anybody dares to doubt it, I will go, like Count Robert, to the crossroad, and give battle for a week to all comers, just as he did."

"Poking fun at the ancient mariner again,—are you?" said the Captain, trying hard to look serious. "And so I'll punish you, my boy, by knocking off just where we are, and saying not another word this blessed day."



CHAPTER XII.

Relates how a Desert Island became a Rock of Good Hope, and other Hopeful Matters which to be understood must be read of.

"You now see," went on the Captain, when the story was again resumed, "that the Dean and myself had by this time fallen into a regular course of life. 'What cannot be helped,' said the Dean, 'we must make the best of.'

"Being thus obliged to make the best of it, we became resigned; and here let me say that even now I feel much surprised at the ease with which we dropped into ways suitable to our new life. You have seen already how one difficulty after another vanished before our patient efforts; and now that we had a fire to warm us, and a hut to shelter us, we felt as if we could overcome almost anything. So we gained great courage, and were fast settling down to business, like any other people, feeling that our lives were at least in no present danger.

"The Dean and I had a conversation about this time, which I will try to repeat as nearly as I can. We were seated on the hillside overlooking the sea to the west, attracted by what we at first took for a ship under full sail, steering right in towards the island; but you can imagine how great was our disappointment when we found that what we had taken for a ship was nothing more than an iceberg looming up above the sea in a misty atmosphere. This was the third time we had been deceived in that manner. Once the Dean had come rushing towards me, shouting at the top of his voice, 'The fleet! the fleet!' meaning the whale-ships; but he might just as well have saved himself all that trouble, for 'the fleet' proved to be only a great group of icebergs; but when I told him so he would hardly believe it, until he became at last convinced that they were not moving.

"You must know that these icebergs assume all sorts of shapes, and it was very natural, since we were always on the lookout for ships, that our imaginations should be excited and disturbed, and ready to see at any time what we most wanted to see; nor were we at all peculiar in this, as many people might tell you who were never cast away in the cold.

"So it is not surprising that we should cry out very frequently 'A sail, a sail!' when there was not a sail perhaps within many hundred miles of us.

"Well, as I was going to say, the Dean and I sat upon the hillside overlooking the sea, thinking the icebergs were ships, or hoping so at least, until hope died away, and then it was that we fell to talking.

"'Do you think, Hardy,' asked the Dean, 'that any other ship than ours ever did come this way or ever will?'

"'I'm afraid not,' said I; and I must have looked very despondent about it, as in truth I was,—much more so than I would have liked to own.

"I had not considered what the Dean was about, for he was despondent enough himself, and no doubt wished very hard that I might say something to cheer him up a bit; but, instead of doing that, I only made him worse, whereupon he seemed to grow angry, and in a rather snappish way he inquired of me if I knew what I was.

"'No,' said I, quite taken aback. 'What do you mean?'

"'Mean!' exclaimed the Dean. 'Why, I mean to say,'—and he spoke in a positive way that was not usual with him,—'I mean to say,' said he, 'that you are a regular Job's comforter, and no mistake.'

"I had not the least idea at that period of my life as to what kind of a thing a Job's comforter was. I had a vague notion that it was something to go round the neck, and I protested that I was nothing of the sort.

"'Yes, you are, and you know you are,' went on the Dean,—'a regular Job's comforter,—croaking all the time, and never seeing any way out of our troubles at all.'

"'I should like to know,' said I,—and I thought I had him there,—'how I can see any way out of our troubles when there isn't any!'

"'Well, you can think there is, if there isn't,—can't you?' and the Dean was ten times more snappish than he was before; and, having thus delivered himself, he snapped himself up and snapped himself off in a great hurry; but, as the little fellow turned to go away, I thought I saw great big tears stealing down his cheeks. I thought that his voice trembled over the last words; and when he went behind a rock and hid himself, I knew that he had gone away to cry, and that he had been ashamed to cry where I could see him.

"After a while I went to him. He was lying on his side, with his head upon his arm. His cap had fallen off, and the light wind was playing gently with his curly hair. The sun was shining brightly in his face, and, sunburnt and weather-beaten though it was, his rosy cheeks were the same as ever. But bitter, scalding tears had left their traces there, for the poor boy had cried himself to sleep.

"His sleep was troubled, for he was calling out, and his hands and feet were twitching now and then, and cruel dreams were weighing on his sleeping, even more heavily, perhaps, than they had been upon his waking thoughts. So I awoke him. He sprang up instantly, looking very wild, and sat upon the rock. 'Where am I? What's the matter? Is that you, Hardy?' were the questions with which he greeted me so quickly that I could not answer one of them. Then he smiled in his natural way, and said, 'After all, it was only a dream.'

"'What was it?' I asked. 'Tell me, Dean, what it was.'

"'O, it was not much, but you see it put me in a dreadful fright. I thought a ship was steering close in by the land; I thought I saw you spring upon the deck and sail away; and as you sailed away upon the silvery sea, I thought you turned and mocked me, and I cursed you as I stood upon the beach, until some foul fiend, in punishment for my wicked words, caught me by the neck, and dragged me through the sea, and tied me fast to the vessel's keel, and there I was with his last words ringing in my ears, with the gurgling waters, "Follow him to your doom," when you awoke me. "Follow him to your doom!" I seem to hear the demon shrieking even now, though I'm wide enough awake.'

"'I don't wonder at your fright, and I'm glad I woke you!' said I, not knowing what else to say.

"'It all comes,' went on the little fellow, 'of my being angry with you, Hardy'; and so he asked me to forgive him, and not think badly of him, and said he would not be so ungrateful any more, and many such things, which it pained me very much to have him say; and so I made him stop, and then somehow or other we got our arms around each other's neck, and we kissed each other's cheeks, and great cataracts of tears came tearing from each other's eyes; and the first and last unkindness that had come between us was passed and gone forever.

"'But do you really think,' said the Dean, when he got his voice again,—'do you really think that, if a ship don't come along and take us off, we can live here on this wretched little island,—that is, when the summer goes, and all the birds have flown away, and the darkness and the cold are on us all the time?'"

"'To be sure we can,' I answered; but, to tell the truth, I had very great doubts about it, only I thought that this would strengthen up the Dean; and as I had, by this time, made for myself a better definition to Job's comforter than a something to go around the neck, I had no idea of being called by that name any more.

"'I'm glad to hear you say that!' exclaimed the Dean. 'Indeed I am!'

"There was no need to give me such very strong assurance that he was 'glad to hear it,' for his face showed as plain as could be that he was glad to hear me say anything that had the least hope in it.

"After this the Dean grew quite cheerful. Suddenly he asked, 'Do you know, Hardy, if this island has a name?'

"Of course I did not know, and told him so.

"'Then I'll give it one right off,' said he; 'I'll call it from this minute the Rock of Good Hope, and here we'll make our start in life. It's as good a place, perhaps, to make a start in life as any other; for nobody is likely to dispute our title to our lands, or molest us in our fortune-making, which is more than could be said if our lot were cast in any other place.'

"This vein of conversation brightened me up a little. Indeed, it was hard to be very long despondent in the presence of the Dean's hopeful disposition. There was much more said of the same nature, which it is not necessary to repeat. It is enough for me to tell you that the upshot of the whole matter was that we came in the end to regard ourselves as settled on the island, if not for the remainder of our lives, at least for an indefinite time, and we made up our minds that there was no use in being gloomy and cast down about it. So from that time forward we were mostly cheerful, and, though you may think it very strange, were generally contented.

"This was a great step gained, and when we now came to make an inventory of our possessions, we did it just as a farmer or merchant would do. Being the undisputed owners of this Rock of Good Hope, we considered ourselves none the less owners of all the foxes, ducks, eggs, eider-down, dead beasts, dry bones, and whatsoever else there might be upon it; and, besides this, we had a lien upon all the seals and walruses and whales of every kind that lived in the sea,—that is, if we could catch them.

"We now worked with even a better spirit than we had done before, for the idea of being settled on the island for life seemed to imply that we had need to look ahead farther than when our hopes of rescue had been strong.

"And first we finished the hut in which we were to live,—doing it not as if we were putting up a tent for temporary use, but as a man who has just come into possession of a large property puts up a fine house on it, that he may be comfortable for the remainder of his days.

"I have told you our hut was about twelve feet square, and that we had, after much hard labor, succeeded in closing it up perfectly, and in making it tight. Along the peak of it, where the two rocks came together, there was a crack which gave us much trouble; but at length we succeeded in pounding down into it, with the but-end of our narwhal horn, a great quantity of moss or turf, and thus closed it tight.

"I must tell you here, while we are on the subject of moss, and since I have spoken about it so often, that the moss grew on our island, as it does in all Arctic countries, with a richness that you never see here,—moss being, in truth, the characteristic vegetation of the Arctic regions. In the valley fronting us there was a bed of it several feet thick. Its fibres were very long,—as much, in some places, as four inches,—all of a single year's growth; and as it had gone on growing year after year, you will understand that there was layer after layer of it. In one place, at the side of the valley to the right as we went down towards the beach, it seemed to have died out after growing for many years; and when we discovered this, we were more rejoiced than we had been at any time since starting the fire; for the moss, being dead, had become dry and hard, and burned almost like peat, as we found when we came to try it in our fireplace; and when we added to it a little of our blubber, it made such a heat that we could not have desired anything better. Indeed, it made our hut so warm that we could leave the door and window both open until the weather became colder.

"One thing which gave us great satisfaction was the immense quantity of the dead moss which was in this bed,—so much, indeed, that, no matter how long we should live there, we could never burn up the hundredth part of it. At first there had not appeared to be much of it, but it developed more and more, like a coal mine, as we dug farther and farther into it.

"Our fireplace was therefore, as you see, a great success; but we were, after a few days, most unexpectedly troubled with it. Thus far the wind had been blowing only in one direction; but afterwards it shifted to the opposite quarter, driving the smoke all down into the hut, and smothering us out. Neither of us being a skilful mason, we could not imagine what was the matter; but finally it occurred to us, after much useless labor had been spent in tearing part of it down and building it up again, that it was too low, being just on a level with the top of the hut; so we ran it up as much higher as we could lift the stones, which was about four feet, and after that we had no more trouble with it.

"Having succeeded so well with our arrangements towards keeping up a fire, we next fitted up a bed, as the storms now began to trouble us, and we found, when we were driven away from the grass, and were obliged to sleep inside of the hut, that it was a very hard place to sleep, being nothing but rough stones, which made us very sore, and made our bones ache.

"The first thing we did now was to build a wall about as high as our knees right across the middle of the hut, from side to side; then, across the space thus enclosed in the back part of the hut, we built up another wall about three feet high,—thus, you see, making two divisions of it.

"One of these divisions we used as a sort of store-room or closet, levelling the bottom of it with flat stone, of which we had no difficulty in getting all we wanted. We also covered the front part of the hut with stones of the same description, thus making quite a smooth floor. It was not large enough, as you will see, to give us much trouble in keeping it clean. Of the second division, in the back part, we made our bed, by first filling it up with moss, then covering the moss over with dry grass.

"Having given up all hope of a ship coming after us, we now gave up watching for one; and we went to sleep together on our new bed, lying on the dry grass, and, as before, covering ourselves over with my large overcoat. We found it to be more comfortable than you would think, and altogether better than anything we had yet had to sleep on. But we came near losing our fire by it, as the last embers were just dying out when we awoke from this our first sleep in the hut.

"But this bed did not exactly suit our fancy, and, seeing the necessity for some better kind of bedclothes, our wits were once more set to working, in order to discover something with which to fasten together the duck-skins that we had been saving and drying, and of which we had now almost a hundred. We had spread them out upon the rocks, and dried them in the sun; for we had seen that, if we could only find something with which to sew them together, we might make all the clothing that we wanted.

"The eider-duck skin is very warm, having, besides its thick coat of feathers, a heavy underlayer of soft warm down, which, as I told you before, the ducks pick off to line their nests with. The skins are also very strong, as well as warm.

"Now, however, as at other times since we had been cast away, good fortune came to us; and we had scarcely begun seriously to feel the need of sewing materials before they were thrown in our way, as if providentially. It happened thus:—

"In cutting the blubber from the dead narwhal, we had quite exposed the strong sinews of the tail, without, however, for a moment imagining that we were preparing the way to a most important and useful discovery. After a while this sinew had become partially dried in the sun, and one day, while busy with some one of our now quite numerous occupations, I was much surprised to see the Dean running towards me from the beach, and was still more surprised when I heard him crying out, 'I have it, I have it!'

"It seemed to me that the Dean was always having something, and I was more than ever curious to know what it was this time.

"He had been down to the beach, and, observing some of the dried sinew, had begun to tear it to pieces; and in this way he found out that he could make threads of it, and he immediately set off to tell me about it. We at once went together down to the beach, and, cutting off all that we could get of this strong sinew, we spread it upon the rocks, that it might dry more thoroughly.

"In a few days the sun had completely dried and hardened a great quantity of this stuff; and we found that, when we came to pick it to pieces, we could make, if we chose, very fine threads of it,—as fine and as strong as ordinary silk. This was a great discovery truly, as it was the only thing now wanting, except some cooking utensils, to complete our domestic furniture. As for the latter, it was some time before we invented anything; but thus far we had been occupied with what seemed to be more important concerns. Over on the opposite side of the island I found some stones of very soft texture; and, upon trying them with my knife, I discovered that they were precisely the same kind of stones that I had often found at home, and which we there called soapstone. Upon making further search there proved to be quite an extensive vein of it; and since I knew that in civilized countries griddles are made out of soapstone, I concluded at once that other kinds of cooking utensils might be made as well. Accordingly I carried to our hut several pieces of it, and there they lay for a good while, until I could find leisure to carve some pots and other things out of them.

"Thus you see we were getting along very well, steadily collecting those things which were necessary as well for our comfort as our safety. If the island on which we had been cast away was barren and inhospitable, it was none the less capable, like almost every other land, in whatever region of the earth, of furnishing subsistence to men.

"When we saw what we could do with the sinew of the narwhal, we immediately set about preparing some bedclothes for ourselves. This we did by squaring off the duck-skins with my knife, and then sewing them tightly together. Thus we obtained, not only a soft bed to lie upon, but a good warm quilt to cover us.

"This done, we went back to the cooking utensils, which you may be sure we were very much in need of. Out of a good large block of soapstone, by careful digging with the knife, we soon made quite a good-sized pot, which was found to answer perfectly. We could now change our diet a little,—at least, I should say, the manner of cooking it; for while we could before only fry our ducks and eggs on flat stones, when we got the pot we could boil them. This gave us great pleasure, as we were getting very tired of having but one style of food; still I cannot say that there was so very much occasion for being over-glad, as at best it was only ducks and eggs, and eggs and ducks, like the boy you have heard of in the story, who had first mush and milk, and then, for variety, milk and mush.

"So one day the Dean said to me, 'Hardy, can't we catch some of these little birds,—auks you call them?' 'How?' said I. 'I don't know,' said he; so we were just as well off as we had been before. But this set us to thinking again; and the birds being very tame, and flying low, it occurred to us that we might make a net, and fasten it to the end of our narwhal horn, which we had thus far only used while making our hut. Luckily for us, the Dean—who, I need hardly say, was a very clever boy in every sense—had learned from one of the sailors the art of net-making; and out of some of the narwhal sinew he contrived, in two days, to construct quite a good-sized net. And now the difficulty was to stretch it; but by this time our inventive faculties had been pretty well sharpened, and we were not long in finding that we could make a perfect hoop by lashing together three seal ribs which we picked up on the beach; and, having fastened this hoop securely to the narwhal horn, we sallied forth to the north side of the island, where the auks were most abundant.



"Hiding ourselves away among the rocks, we waited until a flock of the birds flew over us. They flew very low,—not more than five feet above our heads. When they were least expecting it, I threw up the net, and three of them flew bang into it. They were so much stunned by the blow, that only one of them could flutter out before I had drawn in the net; and the Dean was quick enough to seize the remaining two before they could escape. This, being the first experiment, gave us great encouragement, as it was more successful than we had ventured to hope. We went on with the work, without pausing, for several hours, looking upon it as great sport, as indeed it was; and since it was the first thing we had done on the island that seemed like sport, the day was always remembered by us with delight.

"So now you see we had begun to mingle a little pleasure with our life; and this was a very important matter, for you know the old saying, 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'"



CHAPTER XIII.

The Ancient Mariner takes the Little People on a Little Voyage; and the Little People become convinced that an Arctic Winter, an Aurora Borealis, and an Ancient Mariner, are very Wonderful Things.

A lively breeze was blowing over the little village of Rockdale, and in a lively way the tall trees were bending down their heads, and swinging to and fro as if they liked it; for the leaves were beating time, and were singing joyously, and appeared to be saying all the while how glad they would be to keep beating time and singing on forever, if the wind would only please to be so good as to help them on in the joyous business; and the tall grass and grain were shining in the sun, and rolling round in a very reckless manner, as if they meant to show off their great billows of green and gold, and make the staid and sober little waves that were ruffling up the surface of the bright blue waters of the bay quite ashamed.

"Ha, ha!" laughed our ancient friend, the Captain, when he saw what a day it was. "Ha, ha! what a day indeed!" and right away he began to call loudly for his boy, Main Brace,—

"Main Brace, Main Brace, come here! Come, bear a hand, and be lively there, you plum-duff, chuckle-headed young landlubber, and waddle along aft here on your sausage legs."

A feeble voice is heard to answer from the galley,—"Ay, ay, sir; comin', sir, comin'"; and the plum-duff head and the sausage legs follow feebly in after the voice, looking surprised.

"Main Brace,"—begins the Captain.

"Ay, ay, sir," responds Main Brace; and the plum-duff head lets fall its lower jaw, and looks amazed, the Captain is so much in earnest.

"Some bait, Main Brace! Do you hear, my lad? Be lively, boy, and get some bait; and then overhaul the Alice, and stand by to be ready when I come down. We'll go a-fishing to-day,—do you hear, my boy? And we'll have a jolly time,—do you hear that? So be lively now, and be off with your plum-duff head and your sausage legs. I tell you, away, away! for we'll go a-sailin'. Away, away! for we'll go a-sailin', a-sailin', a-sailin'. Away, away! for we'll go a-sailin',—a-sailin' on the sea."

Without another word the sausage legs made off with the plum-duff head, which had no sooner got outside the door than it began to let out in dislocated fragments, from a mouth that gradually expanded until it reached from ear to ear, "Away, away! we'll go a-fishin', a-fishin', a-fishin'; away, away! we'll go a-sailin', a-sailin', a-sailin'; away, away! we'll all be jolly, jolly, jolly,—we'll all be jolly"; and so on until the sausage legs had carried the plum-duff head and the refrain together so far down among the trees, towards the water, that all the other "jollys" and the sailin's and the "fishin's," and the rest of it, were blown clean away by the wind.

And off went the Captain, too, hurrying up to the top of the hill behind the cottage, as if the cosey little thing was all afire, and the dear old soul was running up for help; and when he reached the top of the hill, he began swinging round his old tarpaulin hat, making the long blue ribbons fairly whistle and speak, as if they would say, "Old man, old man, stop a bit, and take breath!—can't you now? and say, what's this all about, for goodness' sake!"



But the old man knew well enough himself what it was all about; for he was signalling his little friends; and every circle of his big arm, and every shake of his long gray beard, and every swing of his old tarpaulin hat, seemed to sing out, "Hurrah, hurrah, for a jolly day! hurrah, hurrah, my children gay! hurrah, hurrah, let's up and away, upon the bright blue waters!"

By and by the children caught sight of the old tarpaulin hat and the blue ribbons and the Captain himself, all in this state of violent excitement; and down they bore at once upon the ancient mariner, as if he were a regular bluff-bowed old East Indiaman, full of golden ingots, and they were clipper-built, copper-fastened, rakish fore-and-afters of the piratical pattern.

"Heyday!" (the old man never thought he had begun until he had thrown off a heyday or so), "heyday, my hearties!" said the ancient mariner, as the children came up to him,—"heyday, my dears! keep on that same course before the wind, and you'll fetch up in the right port"; and so, without further ado, he hurried "my hearties" down to the beach, and aboard the yacht; and then very soon Main Brace (whose mouth had never left off expanding at the prospect of "a fishin'" and "a sailin'" and "a jolly day" generally) had the anchor away; and then the Captain spread the white sails to the lively breeze; and there never was, since the world began, a merrier little party, in a merrier little craft, afloat upon blue water on a merrier day. Indeed, the day was so merry, and the craft was so merry, and the waves were so merry as they came leaping round the yacht, and the wind was so merry as it bulged out the sail and went whistling through the rigging, and the little party in the yacht were so merry, and everything and everybody was so merry, that it would be strange indeed if the fish were not merry too; and the finny creatures played round the pretty hooks, too merry by half to touch them; and then they came merrily up, and poked their heads out close to the top of the water, and stared at the merry-makers in the yacht, and they seemed to be whispering to one another, "O, what a jolly lot of coves they are, to be sure! O, don't they wish they may catch us?—don't they though?" and then they dropped down again to look at the pretty hooks; but only the sober-sided ones that had no idea of being merry went near enough to bite, and these were surely bitten in return; for, if the hook once got into their red gills, they found themselves jerked up before they could say Lobster, and heard merry voices shouting round them, to their great astonishment.

And of these sober-sided fishes who were so unfortunate as to have no idea of being merry, the Captain and his little friends caught as many as they wanted; and then the Captain said to his little friends, "Put away your fishing-tackle now, and come down below into the little cabin, and I'll surprise you." And, sure enough, he did surprise them,—quite as much, perhaps, as if some fairy queen had come, and called them to a fairy banquet; as much indeed, perhaps, as if they had themselves suddenly been turned to fairies, and were doing something that was never even dreamed of by mortal child before; for, while they had been fishing, Main Brace had, by direction of the Captain, been building up a fire in the little stove, and in the very centre of the cabin he had set out a little table, and upon the little table there was spread the whitest little cloth, and on the cloth were set all round the daintiest little plates and knives and forks, and the neatest little napkins, and the cunningest little cups, that were ever seen.

"And now," spoke up the Captain, laughing all the while to see his little friends so much surprised, "fall to, fall to! for we're going to have a jolly feast, or my name isn't Ancient Mariner, nor John Hardy either." And the Captain poured out some fresh foaming milk into the cunning little cups, from a big stone jug; and he brought some fresh white rolls and some golden butter from a little locker; and soon afterward he drew from the little stove some dainty little fish, and dropped one, all crisp and hissing hot, upon each dainty little plate; and now for half an hour there was busy work enough for the dainty little knives and forks. The Captain's little stove proved to be everything that one could wish for in that line; and the Captain's style of cooking showed plainly enough, as William said, that "the Captain had not travelled round the world, and been an ancient mariner, for nothing."

When the meal was over, and everything was cleared away, and the little cabin was once more in ship-shape order, William proposed the Captain's health,—tossing back his head, and drinking a great quantity of imaginary wine from an imaginary glass. "Here's to the health of Captain Hardy, ancient mariner, and other things too numerous to mention,—the jolliest Jack Tar that ever reefed a sail, or walked on the windward side of a quarter-deck! May Davy Jones be a long while waiting for him; and when he does go into Davy's locker, may he go an Admiral!" And then the children all together "Hip, hip, hurrahed" the Captain, until the old man had nearly split himself with laughing at their childish merriment.

* * * * *

"And now for the story," said the Captain, when the laugh was ended. "What do you say to that?"

"The story,—yes, yes, the story," shouted all the children, merrier than ever.

"Down here, or up on deck?"

"Down here, just where we are; it's such a splendid place!"

"Then down here it shall be," went on the Captain, right well pleased. "Down here it shall be, my dears, if I can only pick up the yarn again where I broke it off. Let me see"; and the old man put a finger to his nose, as he always did when he was thoughtful.

"Aha!" cried he, at length, "I've got my bearings now, as neat as a light-house in a fog. You know, my dears, when we left off last time, we had gone so far along with the story that you could see the Dean and I had got ourselves in soundings, as it were. We had seen the light-ship off the harbor, and were steering for it, so to speak. We had, by working very hard, and by persevering very much, and by using our wits as best we could, gathered about us everything that was needed to insure our present safety, and some things to make us comfortable. We had a hut to shelter us, and clothes to keep us warm, and fire to cook our food.

"But the winter was now coming on very fast, and we knew well enough what that was likely to be. The grass and moss and flowers were dead or dying; the ice was forming on the little pools, and here and there upon the sea; little spurts of snow were coming now and then; the winds were getting to be more fierce and angry, and every day was growing colder and more dark. We knew that the long winter was close upon us, and that the shadow of the night would soon be resting on us all the time. The birds had hatched their young, and quitted their nests, and were flying off to the sunny south, where we so longed to go, and so longed to send a message by them to the loved ones far away. It made us sad—O, how very, very sad!—to see the birds so happy on the wing, and sailing off and leaving us upon the island all alone. Alone,—all, all alone! Alone upon a desert island in the Frozen Sea! Alone in cold and darkness! All, all alone!

"We made ourselves warm coats and stockings out of the skins of the birds that we had caught; and we made caps, too, out of them,—plucking off the feathers, and leaving only the soft, warm, mouse-colored down upon the skin. And out of the seal's skin we made mittens and nice soft boots, or rather, as I might call them, moccasins.

"The birds began to go away about the middle of August, as nearly as we could tell, but it was more than a month after that before they had all left the island. Meanwhile we had caught a great number of them,—two hundred and sixty-six in all; and we had collected, besides, ninety dozen of their eggs. These birds and eggs were all carefully stowed away in our storehouses of ice and rocks near the glacier.

"In the matter of food, we had, therefore, done very well; but we felt the need of some more blubber for our fire, and some warmer clothing than the birds' skins. To supply this latter want, we tried very hard to catch some foxes; but it was a long time before we were successful; for not until all the ducks had gone away would the foxes trouble themselves to go inside our traps. These traps were made of stones, and in building them I had derived the only benefit which had ever resulted to me from my indolent life on the farm. I was always fond of shirking away from my duties, and going into the woods to set rabbit-traps; and, remembering how I made them of wood, I easily contrived a stone one of the same pattern, and it was found afterwards to answer perfectly; for when there were no longer eggs and ducks for them to eat, the foxes went into our traps, which we baited with flesh from the dead narwhal. The pelts of these foxes were thick and warm; and, by the time the weather got very cold, we had obtained a good number, and of them we made suits of clothes at our leisure. There were two kinds of foxes; one was a sort of blue gray, and the other was quite white.

"As the weather grew colder, the little streams which had thus far supplied us with water all froze up; and we had now nothing to depend upon but the freshly fallen snow, which we had, of course, to melt. Thus you see how important it was that I should have found the soapstone in season, and made a pot of it, else we should not only have been obliged to go without boiled food, but likewise without water. As for fuel, we were for the present relieved from all anxiety by a dead walrus and a small white whale which drifted in upon the beach during a westerly gale. The waves being very strong, they were landed so high up on the beach that there was little fear of their being washed away again.

"It was no easy matter to cut these animals up with our one jack-knife, since, before we could get it done, they had frozen quite hard. The temperature had gone down until it was already below freezing all the time; and very soon a great deal of snow fell, and was drifted into heaps by the wind. The sea, soon after this, became frozen over quite solid all about the island, although we could still see plenty of clear, open water in the distance. There was one satisfaction, at least, in this freezing up of the sea: we could walk out upon it, and go all around the island without having to clamber over the rough rocks.

* * * * *

"You have now seen pretty much what our life was on the island, and how we were prepared for the winter. Well, the winter came by and by in good earnest, I can tell you. The sunlight all went away, and then, soon afterward, the autumn twilight went away; and then came the darkness that I told you is constant, in the winter, up towards the North Pole, for the winter there is but one long night, you know."

Here William, who was, as we have seen, of an inquiring turn of mind, interrupted the Captain to ask if he would not be so good as to mention again how dark it was in this polar winter.

"Dark as midnight," replied the Captain, promptly.

"Dark all the time, did you say, Captain Hardy?"

"Yes, dark all the time, my lad,—dark in the morning, dark in the evening, dark at midnight, dark at noon, dark, all the time, as any night you ever saw; only, everything being white with snow, of course makes the night lighter than it does here, where the trees and the houses, and other dark objects, help along the blackness and make it more gloomy,—absorbing the light, you see, while the snow reflects it."

"But what," asked William, "did you do for light in this dark time, since you did not have a lamp?"

"Easy there, my lad," replied the Captain; "I'm just coming to that, you see. Somebody has said that 'necessity is the mother of invention,' or words to that effect; and darkness, I think, may be considered a 'mother' of that description. First we made an open dish of soapstone, and put some oil in it; and then we made a wick out of the dry moss, and set fire to it; but this was found to make so much smoke that it drove us out of the hut, and it was given up. But we did not throw away the dish, and after a while it occurred to us to powder the dry moss by rubbing it between the hands, and with this powdered moss we lined our soapstone dish all over on the inside with a layer a quarter of an inch thick. After smoothing this down all around the edge (this dish, which we called a lamp, was much like a saucer, only rougher and much larger), we filled it half full of oil, and again set fire to it all around the edge; and this time it worked beautifully,—smoking very little, and giving us plenty of light."

"How cunning!" exclaimed the children, all at once.

"Rather so," replied the Captain, "but hardly more so than the two little drinking-cups we carved out of the same kind of soapstone that we made the lamp and pot of."

"It must have felt very queer, Captain Hardy," said Fred, inquiringly, "to be in darkness all the time. I can't imagine such a thing as the winter being all the time dark,—can you, Will?"

"No, I can't," replied William,—"can you, Sister Alice?"

"Yes, I think I can," said Alice, quickly.

"Why, how's that, my little dear?" asked the Captain, greatly interested.

"O," said Alice, in her gentle way, "I've only to think of poor blind Jo going round with his little dog, begging from door to door, and never seeing anything in all the world,—no sun, no moon, no stars, no any light to him at all. Poor Jo's bright summer went out long ago; and both light and warmth were gone, never to come back again, when old Martha died! and all's night to Jo,—and that's how I know what it is to be in darkness all the time"; and as little Alice made this little speech about poor blind Jo, the beggar-man, her lovely face looked thoughtful beyond its years; and, as she finished, the Captain saw a tear stealing from her soft blue eye for poor Jo's sake; and he caught her in his arms right off, without stopping to think at all what he was doing, and he kissed away the tear; and, as he did it, a much bigger one came tearing out of his own great hazel eye, and hurried down into his shaggy beard to hide, as if it were quite frightened at what it had been doing with itself.

"Spoken like the little lady that you are, my dear," broke out the Captain; "always thinking of the unfortunate. And you are very right, my child. Poor blind Jo's darkness is much worse than ours ever was, up in the Frozen Sea, upon the lonely island,—far worse indeed, poor man! for you must know that the stars were shining brightly there upon us all the time; and then the moon came every month; and when it came, it came for good and all, and never set for several days; and then sometimes the aurora borealis would flash across the heavens, and clear away the darkness for a little while, as if it were a huge broom sweeping cobwebs from the skies, and letting in the light of day beneath the stars. O, what a splendid sight it was!"

"O, tell us all about it, Captain Hardy, won't you?" asked all the children, with one voice.

"Of course, I will," replied the Captain, "only I can do no sort of justice to that species of natural scenery, don't you see? That's a touch beyond John Hardy's powers of description, as I can well assure you."

The children all declared that they never could think anything beyond John Hardy's powers, and they believed it too.

"Well, well! Now let me see, my dears, what I can do for you. First, you know the scientific chaps, especially my friend the Doctor, down in Boston, say that the aurora borealis is electricity broke loose, and tearing through the air, from pole to pole, for some purpose of its own. It can't be caught, nor bottled up, as Franklin bottled up the lightning, nor analyzed;—in short, nothing can be done with it; and so it goes tearing through the skies, as I have said before, from pole to pole, just where it likes.

"Now this is what it is, so far as one can see. When you go away beyond the Arctic Circle, you see great fiery streams start up from a fiery arch that stretches right across the sky before you; and from this fiery arch the fiery streams of light shoot up, and then fall back again,—sometimes lasting for a little while, and waving in the sky, to and fro, like a silken curtain of many colors fluttering in the wind; and then again seeming to be phantom things playing hide-and-seek among the stars; sometimes like wicked spirits of the night, bent on mischief; sometimes like tongues of flame from some great fire in some great world beyond the earth, making one almost afraid that the heavens will break out presently in a roaring blaze, and rain a shower of living coals and ashes on his head.

"And O, how grand the colors are sometimes! The great arch of light that spans the sky is often bright with all the colors of the rainbow,—changing every instant. And from these flickering belts of light the fiery streams fly up with lightning speed,—green, and orange, and blue, and purple, and bright crimson,—all mingling here and there and everywhere above, while down beneath comes out in bold relief before the eye the broad, white plain of ice and snow upon the ocean, the great icebergs that lie here and there upon it, the tall white mountains of the land, and the dark islands in the sea; and then the flood of light dies away, and the dark islands in the sea, and the tall white mountains, and the icebergs, and the white plain around, all vanish from the sight, and the mind retains only an impression that the icebergs, with all these bright hues reflected on them from above, had come from space and darkness, like the meteors, then to vanish, and leave the darkness more profound.

"And thus the auroral light and color keep pulsating in the air, up and down, up and down; and thus the icebergs seem to come and go; and the very stars above seem to be rushing out with a bold bright glare, and going back again as quickly, singed and withered, as it were, into puny sparks, and, utterly disheartened with the effort to keep their places in the face of such a flood of brightness, are at length resolved no more to try to twinkle, twinkle through the night.

"And that is all I can tell you about the aurora borealis, for that is all I know about it."

"O, isn't he a great one?" whispered William to Fred, who sat close beside him on the locker,—"isn't he, indeed?—to say he can't describe an aurora borealis, when he has blood, thunder, fire, and all creation on his tongue."

"But," went on the Captain, "in spite of this auroral light and the moonlight, the winter was dreary enough. At first we wanted to sleep all the time; and we had much trouble to keep ourselves from giving way to this desire. If we had done so, it would have made us very unhealthy and altogether miserable. We had to keep up our spirits, whatever else we did; and after a while, to help us with this, we got into regular habits; and we set a great clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day."

"A clock up in the sky!" exclaimed both the boys; "why, Captain Hardy, how was that?"

"Why, don't you see, my lads, the 'Great Bear' and all the other constellations of the north go round and round the Pole-star, which is right above your head; and it so happened that I knew the 'Great Bear,' and the two stars in its side called 'the Pointers' because they point to the Pole-star. Now these two 'Pointers,' going around once in the four-and-twenty hours, pointed up from the south at one time, and up from the north at another time, and up from the east and from the west in the same way; and thus you see we had a clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day, for we had an iceberg picked out all around for every hour, and when 'the Pointers' stood over that particular berg we knew what time it was.

"We should have got along through the winter much more comfortably if we had had some books, or some paper to write on, and pen and ink to write with; but these things were quite beyond the reach of our ingenuity. So our life was very monotonous; doing our daily duties,—that is, whatever we might find to do,—and, after wading through the deep snow in doing it, we came back again to our little hut to get warm, and to eat and talk and sleep.

"And much talking we did, as I can assure you, about each other, and each other's life, and what great things we would do when we got away from the island, hopeless though that seemed. Thus we came gradually to know each other's history, and thus there came to be greater sympathy between us, and more indulgence of each other's whims and fancies, as we got better and better acquainted.

"The Dean had quite a story to relate of himself. He told me that he was born in the great city of New York. His father died before he could remember, and his mother was very poor; but so long as she kept her health she managed, in one way or another, to live along from day to day by sewing; and she managed, too, to send the Dean to school. She loved her bright-haired little boy so very, very much that she would have spent the last cent she could ever earn, could she only give her darling Dean a little knowledge that might help him on in the world when he grew to be a man. And so she stinted herself and saved, all unknown to her darling Dean; and she had not clothing or fire enough to keep her warm in the bleak winter, when the Dean was out, though she had a fine fire when the Dean came back. All would have been well enough if the poor woman had not, with her hard work and her efforts to save, become thin and weak, and then grown sick with fever; and now there was nothing for her but the hospital, for there was no money to pay for medicines, or doctor's bills, to say nothing of rent and fire and clothes.

"And now for the first time the Dean began to realize the situation; and a vague impression crossed his mind, that the poor, pale woman, now restless with pain on a narrow bed in a great long ward of a dreary hospital,—his own dear mother, suffering here with strange hands only to comfort her,—had been brought to this for his sake; and when she grew better, after a long, long time, but was still far from well, he thought and thought, and cried and cried, and prayed and prayed, and wished that he might do something to show his gratitude, and make amends.

"By and by he got into a factory, and worked there early and late, until he too grew sick, and was carried to the hospital, and was laid beside his poor sick mother, on a narrow bed. But he soon got well again, though his mother did not, and then (he could do nothing else) he went to sea as cabin-boy of a ship sailing to Havana; and he came back too; and, with a proud heart beating in his little breast, he carried a little purse of gold and silver coins that the captain gave him to his poor sick mother; and then he went away again on the same ship, and came back once more with another purse of money, twice as big as the first; but the good captain that had been so kind to him, and rewarded him so well, fell sick, and died of yellow fever on the passage home, and the mate, who got command of the ship, being a different sort of man, disliked the Dean, and told him not to come back any more. And so the poor Dean didn't know what to do; until one of his old shipmates met him in the street, and took him off to New Bedford, and shipped him as cabin-boy of the Blackbird. 'And now here I am,' said the poor little Dean, 'and all the rest you know,—cast away in the cold, in this awful place, while my poor sick mother has no money and no friends in all the world, and is thinking all the time what a wretch I am to run away and desert her, when, God knows, I meant to do nothing of the sort!' and so the Dean burst out crying, and, to tell you the truth, I could not help crying a little too.

"But the Dean was a right plucky little fellow, I can tell you; and so full of hope and ambition was he, that nothing could keep him down very long; and nothing, I believe, could ever make him despond for a single minute but thinking of his mother, sick and far away, without friends or money, lying on a narrow bed, all through the weary, dreary days and nights, in the dreary ward of a crowded hospital. Poor Dean! he had something to make him cry, and something always to make him sad, if he had a mind to be; but what had I in comparison?—I who had gone away from home with no good motive like the Dean's.

"After the recital of this story of the Dean's, we were both very sad, until the Dean suddenly roused himself, and said, 'Let's go and look at our traps, Hardy'; and so we sallied out into the moonlight, and waded through the snow, to see if there were any foxes for us. To get outside our hut was not so easy a matter now as it was when we first built it; for, in order to keep the cold winds away, we had made a long, low, narrow passage, with a crook in it, through which we crawled on our hands and knees, before we reached the door.

"We walked all the way around the island, and visited all our traps, of which we had seventeen, but only two of them had foxes in them; the others were either filled with snow, or were completely covered over with it, for the wind had been blowing very hard the day before.

"As we got farther and farther into the winter, we met with some very strange adventures,—altogether different from anything I have told you of before; but you see the sun will soon be going down behind the trees, and we are a good long way from the 'Mariner's Rest,' so 'up anchor' 's the word now, my dears, and 'under way' again."

* * * * *

The merry little yacht was not long in carrying the merry little party over to the Captain's favorite anchorage; and then they were all soon ashore, and after many merry and many pleasant speeches, our little friends parted from the ancient mariner once more, leaving him standing in the shadow of the great tall trees, with a string of fish in one hand; while Fred and William, with Main Brace to help them, and with merry Alice running on ahead, each carried off a string for their next day's breakfast,—a trophy to be proud of, as they thought.



CHAPTER XIV.

Proves the Ingenuity of Seals, and Shows That the Great Polar Bear Is No Respecter of Persons.

"When we were last time cruising in the Alice, I think I told you all about the Arctic winter,—did I not?" said the ancient mariner to his little friends, when they were met once more.

"Yes," answered William (who was always ready to act as spokesman for the party),—"yes, Captain Hardy, all about the Arctic winter, and the aurora borealis, and the wonderful moonlight, and the darkness, and how you and the handsome little Dean lived through it, and what you talked about, and how you passed the time, and what a doleful life you led, and what a dreadful thing it was, and how it made you shiver now to think of it; and—all that, and a great deal more."

"Certainly," replied the Captain, "certainly, that's it,—all told off nicely, my lad, just as if you were boxing the compass or repeating the multiplication table;—all about how we protected ourselves from cold, and kept ourselves from hunger, and prepared a home for ourselves on the Rock of Good Hope. And this seemed likely to be our home for life too,—so far, at least, as we could see; for it appeared clear enough to us that our condition would never change except with death, which we, like everybody else, whether they have ever been cast away or not, wanted to put off as long as possible, having no wish at all to die, and not liking either to freeze or starve: so you see we had good motives for energy and patience."

Here little Alice, in her quiet way, interrupted the Captain to say that the aurora borealis had troubled her dreams all night, and that she would like to know, if the Captain pleased, why anything should have such a strange name.

"That I will tell you with pleasure, my dear," answered the Captain; "I'll tell you all about it,—of course I will. Aurora borealis,—that means northern light; and the name comes from a pagan goddess called Aurora, who was supposed to have rosy fingers, and to ride in a rosy chariot, and who opened the gates of the East every morning, and brought in the light of day; and thus, in course of time, any great flush of light in the heavens got to be called Aurora. And then there was a pagan god called Boreas, who was the North Wind, and had long wings and white hair, and made himself generally disagreeable. So you see Boreas, from being the pagan name for north wind, got to mean the north; and Borealis, from that, became Northern, and Aurora Borealis became Northern Light."

"Thank you, Captain Hardy," said little Alice; and Fred and William said "Thank you" too; while, as for the Captain, he looked very wise and solemn, like other great philosophers, appearing as if he would say, "Don't be surprised, for that's nothing to what I could do if I had a mind," every word of which the children would have believed, you may well be sure. However, the Captain hastened on with the story (which is more to our present purpose) without giving any further proof of his learning.

"When the winter had fairly set in," said he, "our field of operations was much enlarged; and, although the birds had all flown away, we were hardly worse off than before, as you shall see; for all through the summer we had been kept close prisoners on the island; but now, when the ice was solid all over the sea, we could walk out upon it, and this we did as soon as it would bear. Once the Dean broke through, being a little careless of where he was stepping; but I got him out, with no more harm coming to him than a cold bath and a fright.

"Soon after this we made a valuable discovery. Some of the seals have a habit, when the sea is frozen over, of cutting holes through the ice with their sharp claws, in order that they may get their heads above the water to breathe,—the seals not being able, as I have told you before, to breathe under water, like fish. They can keep their heads under water about an hour, by closing up their nostrils, so that not a drop can get in; and, during that time, they do not breathe at all; but at last they must find the open sea, or a crack in the ice, or else dig a hole through the ice from below, and thus get their heads to the surface in some way, or they would drown.

"As we did not then know anything about the habits of the seals in this respect, I was very much surprised one day, while walking over ice that was everywhere apparently very solid, to find one of my feet suddenly break through. I was carrying, at the time, our great narwhal horn, which had already been used for so many purposes; and when I had got my foot, as quickly as possible, out of the water, I pounded with the heavy horn all about the place, and found that there was a large round hole there that had evidently been made by some animal; and I could think of nothing else as likely to have made it but a seal. The reason why I had not seen it was because the snow had drifted over it in a hard crust, and through this crust the seal kept open with his nose a small orifice for breathing, that was not larger round than a silver dollar.

"This discovery made us very glad and very curious,—for, having concluded what it was, we concluded also that there must be more like it, and we went in search of them immediately. Our search was soon rewarded, for these seal-holes were very numerous.

"How to catch a seal was the question which now most occupied our thoughts. The difficulty was very great, for we had no weapons of any sort for such a purpose. Once more, however, we fell back upon our narwhal horn. To this horn we had already become much attached, and, as if to express our gratitude, we had bestowed upon it several names,—as, for instance, 'Life-preserver,' 'Crumply Crowbar,' 'The Castaway's Friend,' and the like of that; but the title which finally stuck to it was 'Old Crumply,'—not that it was exactly a crumply horn, like the one that grew on the head of the cow that tossed the dog, that worried the cat, that killed the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built,—for it was not crumply at all in that sense, but, on the contrary, was as straight as an arrow, and was no further crumply than crumply means wrinkled and twisted; and, indeed, the old horn looked as if it might have been once red-hot, and had been twisted several times around before it had cooled off.

"Besides this 'Old Crumply,' we made another weapon, in quite an ingenious way, as we thought, though at a great expense of time and labor. This was called by several names, like the other; but generally I called it the 'Dean's Delight,' for it was made after the Dean's idea, and he used to flourish it about at a great rate, and was very proud of it. It was simply a kind of spear made by lashing together (after carefully cutting with our knife, and fitting and overlapping) a great many pieces of bones. The lashing was the same string or thong we had before used for the duck-traps. It was very strong, though not half so heavy as 'Old Crumply.'

"But though we had 'Old Crumply,' and the 'Dean's Delight,' we were apparently just as far off as ever from catching a seal. The 'Delight' was tipped with hard ivory (a piece of walrus tusk carved into proper shape with the jack-knife), and 'Crumply' was of the very best kind of ivory throughout, yet we could not sharpen either of them so as to be of much use. But, remembering the general shape of the harpoon-heads used in whale-ships, I managed to cut one of that pattern out of walrus ivory, and this I set on the end of the 'Dean's Delight,' and then, making a hole in the centre of it, I fastened it to the end of one of our long lines. And thus I had obtained all that was needed, in name at least, for catching a seal; but only in name, as was soon proved; for the Dean and I set out at once to try our fortunes in this new line of adventure, and, discovering a seal-hole, we stood near it (on the leeward side, that the seal might not scent us) until the animal appeared, which was not for a long time, and not until we had grown very cold. The seal had evidently been off breathing in another hole. When he did come up, we knew it by a little puff he gave, which threw some spray up through the little orifice in the snow-crust. Quick as thought I plunged the 'Dean's Delight' down into the very centre of the hole, and struck the animal; but the ivory harpoon-head that was on the end of it only glanced off, without penetrating the skin; and the seal, no doubt very much astonished, got off as quickly as he could, more frightened, probably, than hurt; at least, we heard of him no more. He never came back to the hole, for it was all frozen over next day, and so it remained. We afterwards discovered that when a seal-hole has been once touched, the seal will never go back to it.