body a trifle faint. But the lofty impulses of youth survived. My
mind could not be imprisoned, and I held communication with the stars
through the grating of my chamber in the still midnight. At last the
relief came. I had long prayed for it! My deliverer was Sirius, the
brightest of the celestial intelligences. He shone upon my window bars
with an intense concentrated light, and they reddened and melted
before daybreak. I fled to Glasgow in the month of April, 184-, and
obtained a captain's clerkship on the whaler Crimson Dragon.

[Footnote 2: This group of Scilly Islands is in the South Pacific; not
off Land's End.]

"We took in water at the Shetland Islands, and sailing north-westward,
skirted the coast of Greenland, whence, cruising in a southerly
direction, we lay off Labrador, and waited for our prey. Our crew was
fifty men, all told. Our captain had been a whaler thirty-eight years,
and had killed five hundred and six animals or eight more than the
renowned Scoresby. We carried seven light-boats for actual service,
and twenty-seven thousand feet, or more than five miles, of rope.
Three men kept watch, day and night, in the 'crow's-nest,' at the
maintop; but though we beat along the whole coast, through Davis'
Strait, and among the mighty icebergs of Baffin's Bay, we saw no
cetaceous creatures, save twice some floundering porpoises, and thrice
a solitary grampus. With these beings I endeavored to open
communication, but they made no intelligible responses. The stars also
of this latitude failed to comprehend my signals, from which I
concluded that they were less intelligent than those of more temperate
skies. But with the animalcules of the sea I obtained most gratifying
relations. A series of experiments with the _infusoria_ satisfied me
that they were not loath to an exchange of information, and finally
they followed the ship by myriads, so that all the waves were full of
fire, which the sailors remarked; and fearful of being observed, I
ceased my experiments for a time.

"On the evening of the fifth Saturday of our cruise, I waited till the
changing of the watch; then I stole noiselessly upon deck, and
secreted myself behind a life-boat which hung at the side of the
vessel. The helmsman was nodding silently upon his tiller; two seamen
sat motionless upon the bow, and the lookout party in the crow's-nest
talked mutteringly of our ill-luck as they scanned the horizon. The
Northern Lights were pulsing like so