He continues his Story.

"I awakened from my dream, as I told you, and held a council with my companions what course we should take, and it was resolved to go still as the winds should guide us, for as we were in pursuit of pirates, who never sail against the wind, we should be certain to find some; such was my folly, that I asked Carino and Solercio whether they had seen their wives among the number of those who followed Auristella, as I had seen in my dream. They laughed at my inquiry, and desired, and even forced me, to relate to them what I had dreamt.

"For two months we continued cruising about these seas without meeting with any adventure of importance; but we purged them from more than seventy pirate ships, and appropriated the spoil, filling our vessel with immense wealth, which greatly delighted my companions, and they did not regret having exchanged the trade of fishermen for that of pirates, for they were only robbers of the robber, and stole nothing but what was stolen before.

"It happened that the wind blew so obstinately from one quarter, that without slackening sail or altering our course, it drove us forward in such a manner, that for more than a month we sailed on in the same direction, insomuch that my pilot, taking the altitude of the pole, and measuring the knots we made in an hour, and calculating the number of days we had been sailing thus, found that we had gone four hundred leagues, more or less. Again our pilot took his observations, and found that we were on the coast of Norway; then raising his voice in sorrowful accents, he cried, 'Unhappy that we are, if the wind does not change shortly, our lives will be ended here, for we are in the icy sea; I say we are in the frozen ocean, and if the frost comes here, we shall remain, petrified, and fast in these waters.' He had hardly spoken, when we felt that the ship's sides and keel were knocking against moving rocks, as it seemed, by which we guessed that the sea was beginning to freeze, and these ice mountains thus formed underneath obstruct the vessel's course. We lowered the sails at once, lest they should be torn by touching them, and all that day and night the water froze and pressed around us, so that it held us fast enclosed, like a stone that is set in a ring; and now all at once the frost began to benumb our bodies, and sadden our spirits, till fear took possession of us, and we, seeing the imminent peril of our situation, could only look forward to our lives lasting for just as many days as we had food in the ship to sustain them. From this moment we put ourselves on an allowance, and the measure appointed for each was so small that we soon began to feel the pangs of hunger. We looked around on every side, but met with nothing that could afford the slightest hope, unless it might be a dark bulky object, which appeared to us about seven or eight miles distant. But this we supposed likely to be some other vessel, which the ice held imprisoned like our own.

"Our present danger surpassed all the former ones which I had ever experienced, because a protracted dread, and a continued expectation of death, is more trying than a speedy one, which spares us all those horrors and agonies which are far worse than death itself. Seeing then that we were threatened with starvation, we came to a resolution, which was rash at least, if not quite desperate; and considering that the human mind can conceive no death more terrible than that by hunger, we determined to leave our vessel, and travel across the ice, to see............