well.

At length the fire died down: the crematory process was completed;
nothing remained of the pyre and its burden but a smouldering heap of
grey, flaky ashes; and we returned sorrowfully to our hut, there to
forget in sleep, if we could, the grievous loss we had sustained.

The painful incident of Daphne's death produced so distressing an effect
upon Smellie in his feeble condition that another week passed away
before he was sufficiently recovered to admit of our resuming our
journey. By the end of that time, however, his strength had in some
measure returned, and a feverish anxiety to get away from the scene of
the tragedy having taken possession of him, we made what few
preparations we had it in our power to make and got under weigh directly
after breakfast on one of the most delightful mornings it has ever been
my good fortune to witness.

Our progress was, of course, painfully slow; but by this time speed was
a matter of merely secondary importance, since we knew that we must long
since have been given up by our shipmates as dead; and that the _Daphne_
was, in all probability, hundreds of miles away in an unknown direction.
It was quite possible that on reaching the river's mouth we might have
to wait weeks, or even months, before she would again make her
appearance and give us an opportunity to rejoin.

Day after day we plodded on through the glorious forest, following no
pathway, but shaping a course as directly west as circumstances would
permit, meeting with no incidents worthy of mention, picking up a
sufficient subsistence without much trouble, our way beguiled by
glorious prospects of wood and river, and our curiosity fed by the
countless strange glimpses into the secrets of nature afforded us as we
wended our way through that lonely wilderness. We slept well at night
in spite of the babel of sounds which rose and fell around us; awoke in
the morning refreshed and hungry; and so entered upon another day. The
life was by no means one of hardship; and what was most important of
all, Smellie was slowly but steadily regaining strength and progressing
toward recovery.

At length, late in the afternoon of the fifth day from that which had
witnessed the resumption of our journey, our wanderings came
unexpectedly to an end, for a time at least, by our stumbling, in the
most unexpected manner in the world, upon a human habitation. And the
strangest as well as the most fortunate part of it was that the
ha