six English miners and engaged them to go with him, bought
as full an outfit as possible, through a trader ordered more, including a
portable saw-mill from England, made an arrangement with Sedgwick how to
send and receive news, and the two tired men lay down to take their last
night's rest together for, as they calculated, at least six or seven
months, perhaps a full year.

It was a memorable night to both, and the confidences they exchanged and
the sacred trusts they each assumed, they never forgot.

In the morning Jordan started back for the mountains and their solitudes;
Sedgwick boarded the steamer, which later in the day started on its
voyage, and the sea for Sedgwick was a counterpart of the solitude which
the mountains held for Jordan, except that at Port Natal he had received
from his Grace the greetings which her soul had given his soul through
the mornings and evenings of the first twenty days of her married life.
They were to be his balm through all the days of his imprisonment on
board ship, and he felt that they would be sufficient. But it grieved
him to think that poor, brave, sorrowing, but cheerful and clear-brained
Jordan had no such comforters.

"It is very lonely, my glorified one," she wrote; "the roar of the great
city seems to me an echo of the voice of the ocean, of the wilderness
that surrounds you; but I would not have it different, for I kept saying
to myself: 'He is doing his duty, and beyond the horizon that bounds our
eyes now, I know that higher joy awaits us which comes of a consciousness
of a great trust bravely executed.' Be of good cheer, my love; it will be
all right in the end, for the heavens themselves bend to be the stay of
steadfast souls when with a holy patience they struggle for the right, as
God gives them to see the right.

"I will wait for you, and in thinking what you have undertaken, and of
the persistence required to carry your work through, will try to catch
your own grand spirit, try to exalt myself by imitating your patience
and faith, and thus be more worthy of you when once more it is given me
to clasp your dear hands, and to gaze into your true eyes, which are my
light."

As Sedgwick read, his eyes became suffused until he could not see the
page before him because of his tears.

"See," he said to himself; "a man's love is selfish; it is a woman's life
and light, and yet my beautiful wife loses sight of herself, and all her
words are but an inspiration for me