expressive than "he gaze of her who had nurtured the infancy
of the Southern Heiress, in innocence and love. His brow grew thoughtful,
and his lips became compressed, while all the resources of his fertile
imagination and long experience gathered in his mind, in engrossing
intense reflection.

"Is there hope?" demanded the governess, who was watching the change of
his working countenance, with an attention that never swerved.

The gloom passed away from his swarthy features, and the smile that
lighted them was like the radiance of the sun, as it breaks through the
blackest vapours of the drifting gust.

"There is!" he said with firmness; "our case is far from desperate."

"Then, may He who rules the ocean and the land receive the praise!" cried
the grateful governess giving vent to her long-suppressed agony in a flood
of tears.

Gertrude cast herself upon the neck of Mrs Wyllys, and for a minute their
unrestrained emotions were mingled.

"And now, my dearest Madam," said Gertrude, leaving the arms of her
governess, "let us trust to the skill of Mr Wilder; he has foreseen and
foretold this danger; equally well may he predict our safety."

"Foreseen and foretold!" returned the other, in a manner to show that her
faith in the professional prescience of the stranger was not altogether so
unbounded as that of her more youthful and ardent companion. "No mortal
could have foreseen this awful calamity; and least of all, foreseeing it,
would he have sought to incur its danger! Mr Wilder, I will not annoy you
with requests for explanations that might now be useless, but you will not
refuse to communicate your grounds of hope."

Wilder hastened to relieve a curiosity that he well knew must be as
painful as it was natural. The mutineers had left the largest, and much
the safest, of the two boats belonging to the wreck, from a desire to
improve the calm, well knowing that hours of severe labour would be
necessary to launch it, from the place it occupied between the stumps of
the two principal masts, into the ocean. This operation, which might have
been executed in a few minutes with the ordinary purchases of the ship,
would have required all their strength united, and that, too, to be
exercised with a discretion and care that would have consumed too many of
those moments which they rightly deemed to be so precious at that wild and
unstable season of the year. Into this little ark Wilder proposed to
convey such articles of c