WITH lucid intervals, during which he replentished or rebuilt the fire, cooked the bear-meat, and fed and dressed the wounds of the child, this delirium lasted three days. His suffering was intense. His arm, the seat of throbbing pain, had swollen to twice the natural size, while his side prevented him taking a full breath, voluntarily. He had paid no attention to his own hurts, and it was either the vigor of a constitution that years of dissipation had not impaired, or some anti-febrile property of bear-meat, or the absence of the exciting whisky that won the battle. He rekindled the fire with his last match on the evening of the third day and looked around the darkening horizon, sane, but feeble in body and mind.

If a sail had appeared in the interim, he had not seen it; nor was there one in sight now. Too weak to climb the slope, he returned to the boat, where the child, exhausted from fruitless crying, was now sleeping. His unskillful and rather heroic manner of wrapping it up to protect it from cold had, no doubt, contributed largely to the closing of its wounds by forcibly keeping it still, though it must have added to its present sufferings. He looked for a moment on the wan, tear-stained little face, with its fringe of tangled curls peeping above the wrappings of canvas, and stooping painfully down, kissed it softly; but the kiss awakened it and it cried for its mother. He could not soothe it, nor could he try; and with a formless, wordless curse against destiny welling up from his heart, he left it and sat down on the wreckage at some distance away.

“We’ll very likely get well,” he mused, gloomily, unless I let the fire go out. What then? We can’t last longer than the berg, and not much longer than the bear. We must be out of the tracks — we were about nine hundred miles out when we struck; and the current sticks to the fog-belt here — about westsou’west — but that’s the surface water. These deep fellows have currents of their own. There’s no fog; we must be to the southward of the belt — between the Lanes. They’ll run their boats in the other Lane after this, I think — the money-grabbing wretches. Curse them — if they’ve drowned her. Curse them, with their water-tight compartments, and their logging of the lookouts. Twenty-four boats for three thousand people — lashed down with tarred gripe-lashings — thirty men to clear them away, and not an axe on the boat-deck or a sheath-knife on a man. Could she have got away? If they got that boat down, they might have taken her in from the steps; and the mate knew I had her child — he would tell her. Her name must be Myra, too; it was her voice I heard in that dream. That was hasheesh. What did they drug me for? But the whisky was all right. It’s all done with now, unless I get ashore — but will I?”

The moon rose above the castellated structure to the left, flooding the icy beach with ashen-gray light, sparkling in a thousand points from the cascades, streams, and rippling pools, throwing into blackest shadow the gullies and hollows, and bringing to his mind, in spite of the weird beauty of the scene, a crushing sense of loneliness — of littleness — as though the vast pile of inorganic desolation which held him was of far greater importance than himself, and all the hopes, plans, and fears of his lifetime. The child had cried itself to sleep again, and he paced up and down the ice.

“Up there,” he said, moodily, looking into the sky, where a few stars shone faintly in the flood from the moon; “Up there — somewhere — they don’t know just where — but somewhere up above, is the Christians’ Heaven. Up there is their good God — who has placed Myra’s child here — their good God whom they borrowed from the savage, bloodthirsty race that invented him. And down below us — somewhere again — is their hell and their bad god, whom they invented themselves. And they give us our choice Heaven or hell. It is not so — not so. The great mystery is not solved — the h............