ice-prison, if only
for the winter; "I have neither clothes nor cash."

"Well, I don't see what you're going to do with the latter, just yet;
but, man, you can just help yourself from the first Cunarder we
stop--pshaw! don't look like that; wait until you feel the excitement
of it all. Why, what is but one ship against the world, big men on
their knees to you, money enough to wade in, and a fig for all the
navies and all the fleets that ever left a port? I defy 'em to put a
hand on the ship if they spend a million in the process. Come with us
and see it all, and you'll say it's the most daring, the grandest, the
most stupendous enterprise that man ever conceived."

It was no good to lift up one's voice against enthusiasm of this sort,
so I let him lead me to his room, and took from him a trunk with some
linen. As he said, it was more convenient to have my own things, and we
were much of a build, so that his clothes were no ill-fit; and he was
ridiculously generous, pressing all that he had upon me, and lending me
a great gold watch and gold studs that were illicitly gotten, I felt
sure.

In the end I had quite a store of clothing; and I waited while he
finished his own work that we might go down together to the launch
awaiting us. There we found Black, watching men who were putting large
bales of goods into the screw steamer, and everywhere there was sign of
the break-up of the settlement. The captain merely nodded when I gave
him a word, and I thought that he was sore depressed, with scarce
energy enough to be irritable. He seemed to doubt the wisdom of the
departure even then; and he often hesitated in his walk, looking up to
the windows of his home behind him. At the last, when the negro
servants had come down the iron stairway, he locked the great door
after them; and then he stood and cast his gaze over to the hills and
the desolate land, which I believed he had a great kindness for. When
he did join us, he gave the word, "Let her go!" with a dogged sort of
indifference; and at his command the launch ploughed ahead, and passed
through the canyon to the outer basin.

The sun was almost in the horizon then, and the northern lights were
playing in the heavens, so that all the water was then alight with the
glory of a hundred colours. Now orange, or a lighter golden, or blue as
the Corsican Sea, or flaming scarlet, or emerald green, or all shades
of yellow, with the pink and pearl and fainter green as of a colossa