blow on the back of my head at the time we came ashore, and it pained
me at times, and my strength was broken, anyway; I've never been so able
since."

Captain Littlepage fell into a reverie.

"Then I had the good of my reading," he explained presently. "I had
no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his books were
foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember. The old poets
little knew what comfort they could be to a man. I was well acquainted
with the works of Milton, but up there it did seem to me as if
Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea terms very accurate, and some
beautiful passages were calming to the mind. I could say them over until
I shed tears; there was nothing beautiful to me in that place but the
stars above and those passages of verse.

"Gaffett was always brooding and brooding, and talking to himself; he
was afraid he should never get away, and it preyed upon his mind. He
thought when I got home I could interest the scientific men in his
discovery: but they're all taken up with their own notions; some didn't
even take pains to answer the letters I wrote. You observe that I said
this crippled man Gaffett had been shipped on a voyage of discovery. I
now tell you that the ship was lost on its return, and only Gaffett and
two officers were saved off the Greenland coast, and he had knowledge
later that those men never got back to England; the brig they shipped on
was run down in the night. So no other living soul had the facts, and
he gave them to me. There is a strange sort of a country 'way up north
beyond the ice, and strange folks living in it. Gaffett believed it was
the next world to this."

"What do you mean, Captain Littlepage?" I exclaimed. The old man was
bending forward and whispering; he looked over his shoulder before he
spoke the last sentence.

"To hear old Gaffett tell about it was something awful," he said, going
on with his story quite steadily after the moment of excitement had
passed. "'Twas first a tale of dogs and sledges, and cold and wind and
snow. Then they begun to find the ice grow rotten; they had been frozen
in, and got into a current flowing north, far up beyond Fox Channel,
and they took to their boats when the ship got crushed, and this warm
current took them out of sight of the ice, and into a great open sea;
and they still followed it due north, just the very way they had planned
to go. Then they struck a coast that wasn't laid down or charte