the right one open. Having concluded, he shut and
screwed up the right eye, and opened the left--he reversed the engine,
so to speak, as if he wished to back out from the scene of his triumph
and leave the course clear for others to speak. But his words were
thrown away on Mrs. Bright, who was emphatically a weak-minded woman,
and never exercised her reason at all, except in a spasmodic, galvanic
sort of way, when she sought to defend or to advocate some unreasonable
conclusion of some sort, at which her own weak mind had arrived somehow.
So she shook her head, and sobbed good-bye to Buzzby, as she ascended
the sloping avenue that led to her pretty cottage on the green hill that
overlooked the harbour and the sea beyond.

As for John Buzzby, having been absent from home full half-an-hour
beyond his usual dinner-hour, he felt that, for a man who had lashed his
helm amid-ships, he was yawing alarmingly out of his course; so he
spread all the canvas he could carry, and steered right before the wind
towards the village, where, in a little whitewashed, low-roofed,
one-doored, and two little-windowed cottage, his spouse (and dinner)
awaited him.

To make a long story short, three years passed away, but the _Pole Star_
did not return, and no news of her could be got from the various
whale-ships that visited the port of Grayton. Towards the end of the
second year Buzzby began to shake his head despondingly; and as the
third drew to a close, the expression of gloom never left his honest,
weather-beaten face. Mrs. Bright, too, whose anxiety at first was only
half genuine, now became seriously alarmed, and the fate of the missing
brig began to be the talk of the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, Fred Ellice
and Isobel grew and improved in mind and body; but anxiety as to his
father's fate rendered the former quite unable to pursue his studies,
and he determined at last to procure a passage in a whale-ship, and go
out in search of the brig.

It happened that the principal merchant and shipowner in the town, Mr.
Singleton by name, was an intimate friend and old school-fellow of
Captain Ellice, so Fred went boldly to him and proposed that a vessel
should be fitted out immediately, and sent off to search for his
father's brig. Mr. Singleton smiled at the request, and pointed out the
utter impossibility of his agreeing to it; but he revived Fred's sinking
hopes by saying that he was about to send out a whaler to the Northern
Seas at any ra