e reward offered for news of the lost ones, twenty thousand for
the recovery; and the advertisement appeared in every newspaper likely
to reach the eyes of a sailor, from the Liverpool Post to the Dead Bird.

The years passed without anything definite coming in answer to all
these advertisements. Once news came of two children saved from the sea
in the neighbourhood of the Gilberts, and it was not false news, but
they were not the children he was seeking for. This incident at once
depressed and stimulated him, for it seemed to say, "If these children
have been saved, why not yours?"

The strange thing was, that in his heart he felt a certainty that they
were alive. His intellect suggested their death in twenty different
forms; but a whisper, somewhere out of that great blue ocean, told him
at intervals that what he sought was there, living, and waiting for him.

He was somewhat of the same temperament as Emmeline--a dreamer, with a
mind tuned to receive and record the fine rays that fill this world
flowing from intellect to intellect, and even from what we call
inanimate things. A coarser nature would, though feeling, perhaps, as
acutely the grief, have given up in despair the search. But he kept on;
and at the end of the fifth year, so far from desisting, he chartered a
schooner and passed eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling at
little-known islands, and once, unknowing, at an island only three
hundred miles away from the tiny island of this story.

If you wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do not
look at a map of the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of square leagues of sea, thousands of islands, reefs, atolls.

Up to a few years ago there were many small islands utterly unknown;
even still there are some, though the charts of the Pacific are the
greatest triumphs of hydrography; and though the island of the story
was actually on the Admiralty charts, of what use was that fact to
Lestrange?

He would have continued searching, but he dared not, for the desolation
of the sea had touched him.

In that eighteen months the Pacific explained itself to him in part,
explained its vastness, its secrecy and inviolability. The schooner
lifted veil upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. He
could only move in a right line; to search the wilderness of water with
any hope, one would have to be endowed with the gift of moving in all
directions at once.

H