ce. "It is but a few hours that we live in this state of trials,
compared to the endless existence that is to succeed it."

"I wish I knew all about this voyage of Roswell's," she added, aloud; for
she was perfectly certain that there was something to be told that, as
yet, the deacon had concealed from her. "It might relieve your mind, and
lighten your spirits of a burthen, to make me a confidant."

The deacon mused in silence for more than five minutes. Seldom had his
thoughts gone over so wide a reach of interests and events in so short a
space of time; but the conclusion was clear and decided.

"You ought to know all, Mary, and you shall know all," he answered, in the
manner of a man who had made up his mind beyond appeal. "Gar'ner has gone
a'ter seal to some islands that the Daggett who died here, about a year
and a half ago, told me of; islands of which nobody know'd anything,
according to his account, but himself. His shipmates, that saw the place
when he saw it, were all dead, afore he let me into the secret."

"I have long suspected something of the sort, sir, and have also supposed
that the people on Martha's Vineyard had got some news of this place, by
the manner in which Captain Daggett has acted."

"Isn't it wonderful, gal? Islands, they tell me, where a schooner can
fill up with ile and skins, in the shortest season in which the sun ever
shone upon an antarctic summer! Wonderful! wonderful!"

"Very extraordinary, perhaps; but we should remember, uncle, at how much
risk the young men of the country go on these distant voyages, and how
dearly their profits are sometimes bought."

"Bought! If the schooner would only come back, I should think nothing of
all that. It's the cost of the vessel and outfit, Mary, that weighs so
much on _my_ spirits. Well, Gar'ner's first business is with them islands,
which are at an awful distance for one to trust his property; but,
'nothing ventured, nothing got,' they say. By my calculations, the
schooner has had to go a good five hundred miles among the ice, to get to
the spot; not such ice as a body falls in with, in going and coming
between England and Ameriky, as we read of in the papers, but ice that
covers the sea as we sometimes see it piled up in Gar'ner's Bay, only a
hundred times higher, and deeper, and broader, and colder! It's desperate
_cold_ ice, the sealers all tell me, that of the antarctic seas. Some on
'em think it's colder down south than it is the other w