ause I desire that people may
know the truth, for then all mystery concerning the frozen Northland
will be explained. There is no chance of your suffering the fate
I suffered. They will not put you in irons, nor confine you in a
mad-house, because you are not telling your own story, but mine, and I,
thanks to the gods, Odin and Thor, will be in my grave, and so beyond
the reach of disbelievers who would persecute."

Without a thought of the farreaching results the promise entailed, or
foreseeing the many sleepless nights which the obligation has since
brought me, I gave my hand and with it a pledge to discharge faithfully
his dying wish.

As the sun rose over the peaks of the San Jacinto, far to the eastward,
the spirit of Olaf Jansen, the navigator, the explorer and worshiper of
Odin and Thor, the man whose experiences and travels, as related, are
without a parallel in all the world's history, passed away, and I was
left alone with the dead.

And now, after having paid the last sad rites to this strange man
from the Lofoden Islands, and the still farther "Northward Ho!", the
courageous explorer of frozen regions, who in his declining years (after
he had passed the four-score mark) had sought an asylum of restful peace
in sun-favored California, I will undertake to make public his story.

But, first of all, let me indulge in one or two reflections:

Generation follows generation, and the traditions from the misty past
are handed down from sire to son, but for some strange reason interest
in the ice-locked unknown does not abate with the receding years, either
in the minds of the ignorant or the tutored.

With each new generation a restless impulse stirs the hearts of men to
capture the veiled citadel of the Arctic, the circle of silence, the
land of glaciers, cold wastes of waters and winds that are strangely
warm. Increasing interest is manifested in the mountainous icebergs, and
marvelous speculations are indulged in concerning the earth's center of
gravity, the cradle of the tides, where the whales have their nurseries,
where the magnetic needle goes mad, where the Aurora Borealis illumines
the night, and where brave and courageous spirits of every generation
dare to venture and explore, defying the dangers of the "Farthest
North."

One of the ablest works of recent years is "Paradise Found, or the
Cradle of The Human Race at the North Pole," by William F. Warren. In
his carefully prepared volume, Mr. Warren