if they've drowned her. Curse them, with their water-tight
compartments, and their logging of the lookouts. Twenty-four boats for
three thousand people--lashed down with tarred gripe-lashings--thirty
men to clear them away, and not an axe on the boat-deck or a
sheath-knife on a man. Could she have got away? If they got that boat
down, they might have taken her in from the steps; and the mate knew I
had her child--he would tell her. Her name must be Myra, too; it was her
voice I heard in that dream. That was hasheesh. What did they drug me
for? But the whisky was all right. It's all done with now, unless I get
ashore--but will I?"

The moon rose above the castellated structure to the left, flooding the
icy beach with ashen-gray light, sparkling in a thousand points from the
cascades, streams, and rippling pools, throwing into blackest shadow the
gullies and hollows, and bringing to his mind, in spite of the weird
beauty of the scene, a crushing sense of loneliness--of littleness--as
though the vast pile of inorganic desolation which held him was of far
greater importance than himself, and all the hopes, plans, and fears of
his lifetime. The child had cried itself to sleep again, and he paced up
and down the ice.

"Up there," he said, moodily, looking into the sky, where a few stars
shone faintly in the flood from the moon; "Up there--somewhere--they
don't know just where--but somewhere up above, is the Christians'
Heaven. Up there is their good God--who has placed Myra's child
here--their good God whom they borrowed from the savage, bloodthirsty
race that invented him. And down below us--somewhere again--is their
hell and their bad god, whom they invented themselves. And they give us
our choice--Heaven or hell. It is not so--not so. The great mystery is
not solved--the human heart is not helped in this way. No good, merciful
God created this world or its conditions. Whatever may be the nature of
the causes at work beyond our mental vision, one fact is indubitably
proven--that the qualities of mercy, goodness, justice, play no part in
the governing scheme. And yet, they say the core of all religions on
earth is the belief in this. Is it? Or is it the cowardly, human fear of
the unknown--that impels the savage mother to throw her babe to a
crocodile--that impels the civilized man to endow churches--that has
kept in existence from the beginning a class of soothsayers,
medicine-men, priests, and clergymen, all living on the