following plan was adopted:--

The mates were to be called, and made acquainted with what had occurred,
and put on their guard as to what might possibly be required of them. It
was not thought necessary to call any of the rest of the men. There was
always one hand on the watch in the house, whose duty it was to look to
the fires, for the double purpose of security against a conflagration, and
to prevent the warmth within from sinking too near to the cold without. It
had often occurred to Roswell's mind that a conflagration would prove
quick destruction to his party. In the first place, most of the
provisions would be lost; and it was certain that, without a covering and
the means of keeping warm within it, the men could not resist the climate
eight-and-forty hours. The burning of the hut would be certain death.

Roswell took no one with him but Stimson. Two were as good as a hundred,
if all that was asked were merely the means to re-light the fire. These
means were provided, and a loaded pistol was taken also, to enable a
signal-shot to be fired, should circumstances seem to require further aid.
One or two modes of communicating leading facts were concerted, when our
hero and his companion set forth on their momentous journey.

Taking the hour, the weather, and the object before him into the account,
Roswell Gardiner felt that he was now enlisted in the most important
undertaking of his whole life, as he and Stephen shook hands with the two
mates, and left the point. The drifts rendered a somewhat circuitous path
necessary at first; but the moon and stars shed so much of their radiance
on the frozen covering of the earth, that the night was quite as light as
many a London day. Excitement and motion kept the blood of our two
adventurers in a brisk circulation, and prevented their becoming
immediately conscious of the chill intensity of the cold to which they
were exposed.

"It is good to think of Almighty. God, and of his many marcies," said
Stephen, when a short distance from the house, "as a body goes forth on an
expedition as serious as this. We may not live to reach the wrack, for it
seems to me to grow colder and colder!"

"I wonder we hear no more of the cries," remarked Roswell, who was
thinking of the distress he was bent on relieving. "One would think that a
man who could call so stoutly would give us another cry."

"A body can never calcilate on a nigger," answered Stephen, who had the
popular American pre