wake spoke to her
of that path 'like a shining light, shining more and more unto the
perfect day.' If with it came the remembrance of his vision of the
threads of light, it was not a recollection which would lead to
repining.

And when at Cape Horn, a mighty ice mountain drifted within view,
spired, pinnacled, encrusted with whiteness, rivalled only by the glory
of the summer cloud, caverned here and there into hollows of sapphire
blue, too deeply dazzling to behold, or rising into peaks of clear,
hard, chill green; the wild fantastic points sometimes glimmering with
fragments of the rainbow arch; the rich variety, endless beyond measure
in form and colouring, and not only magnificent and terrible in the
whole mass, but lovely beyond imagination in each crystal too minute
for the eye. Mary had once, on a like occasion, only said, 'it was
very cold;' and looked to see whether the captain expected the monster
to bear down on the ship. But the present iceberg put her in mind of
the sublime aspirations which gothic cathedrals seem as if they would
fain embody. And then, she thought of the marvellous interminable
waste of beauty of those untrodden regions, whence yonder enormous
iceberg was but a small fragment--a petty messenger--regions unseen by
human eye--beauty untouched by human hand-the glory, the sameness, yet
the infinite variety of perfect purity. Did it not seem, with all the
associations of cold, of peril, of dreariness, to be a visible token
that indeed He who fashioned it could prepare 'good things past man's
understanding!'

It was well for Mary that southern constellations, snowy, white-winged
albatross, leaping flying-fish, and white-capped mountain-coast, had
been joined in her mind with something higher, deeper, and less
personal, or their recurrence would have brought her nothing but pain
unmitigated in the contrast with the time when first she had beheld
them six years ago.

Then she was full of hope and eager ardour to arrive, longing for the
parental presence of which she had so long been deprived, hailing every
novel scene as a proof that she was nearer home, and without the
anticipation of one cloud, only expecting to be loved, to love, and to
be useful. And now, all fond illusions as to her father had been
snatched away, her very love for him rendering the perception doubly
cruel; her mother, her precious mother, far away in Ormersfield
churchyard--her life probably shortened by his harshne