be he lived on, had
been shouldering his way to the hitherto inviolable regions of the
Poles; but now the time had come to turn his knowledge to account.

"How?" said my husband.

"By putting himself into such a position," said Martin, "that he will be
able to predict, six, eight, ten days ahead, the weather of a vast part
of the navigable and habitable world--by establishing installations of
wireless telegraphy as near as possible to the long ice-barrier about
the Pole from which ice-floes and icebergs and blizzards come, so that
we can say in ten minutes from the side of Mount Erebus to half the
southern hemisphere, 'Look out. It's coming down,' and thus save
millions of lives from shipwreck, and hundreds of millions of money."

"Splendid, by Jove!" said Mr. Eastcliff.

"Yes, ripping, by jingo!" said Mr. Vivian.

"A ridiculous dream!" muttered my husband, but not until Martin had
gone, and then Alma, seeing that I was all aglow, said:

"What a lovely man! I wonder you don't see more of him, Mary, my love.
He'll be going to the ends of the earth soon, and then you'll be sorry
you missed the chance."

Her words hurt me like the sting of a wasp, but I could not resist them,
and when some days later Martin called to take me to the Geographical
Society, where his commander, Lieutenant ---- was to give an account of
their expedition, I could not find it in my heart to refuse to go.

Oh, the difference of this world from that in which I had been living
for the past six months! All that was best in England seemed to be
there, the men who were doing the work of the world, and the women who
were their wives and partners.

The theatre was like the inside of a dish, and I sat by Martin's side on
the bottom row of seats, just in front of the platform and face to face
with the commander.

His lecture, which was illustrated by many photographic lantern slides
of the exploring party, (including the one that had been shown to me on
the ship) was very interesting, but terribly pathetic; and when he
described the hardships they had gone through in a prolonged blizzard on
a high plateau, with food and fuel running low, and no certainty that
they would ever see home again, I found myself feeling for Martin's hand
to make sure that he was there.

Towards the end the commander spoke very modestly of himself, saying he
could never have reached the 87th parallel if he had not had a crew of
the finest comrades that ever sailed on