equest to whoever might find
it to forward it to the office of the _New York Herald_. This little
bag was fastened to the neck of the albatross, and not to its foot,
for these birds are in the habit of resting on the surface of the sea;
then liberty was given to this swift courier of the air, and it was
not without some emotion that the colonists watched it disappear in
the misty west.

"Where is he going to?" asked Pencroft.

"Towards New Zealand," replied Herbert.

"A good voyage to you," shouted the sailor, who himself did not expect
any great result from this mode of correspondence.

With the winter, work had been resumed in the interior of Granite
House, mending clothes and different occupations, amongst others
making the sails for their vessel, which were cut from the
inexhaustible balloon-case.

During the month of July the cold was intense, but there was no lack
of either wood or coal. Cyrus Harding had established a second
fireplace in the dining-room, and there the long winter evenings were
spent. Talking whilst they worked, reading when the hands remained
idle, the time passed with profit to all.

[Illustration: THE MESSENGER]

It was real enjoyment to the settlers when in their room, well lighted
with candles, well warmed with coal, after a good dinner, elder-berry
coffee smoking in the cups, the pipes giving forth an odoriferous
smoke, they could hear the storm howling without. Their comfort would
have been complete, if complete comfort could ever exist for those who
are far from their fellow creatures, and without any means of
communication with them. They often talked of their country, of the
friends whom they had left, of the grandeur of the American Republic,
whose influence could not but increase, and Cyrus Harding, who had
been much mixed up with the affairs of the Union, greatly interested
his auditors by his recitals, his views, and his prognostics.

It chanced one day that Spilett was led to say,--

"But now, my dear Cyrus, all this industrial and commercial movement
to which you predict a continual advance, does it not run the danger
of being sooner or later completely stopped?"

"Stopped! And by what?"

"By the want of coal, which may justly be called the most precious of
minerals."

"Yes, the most precious indeed," replied the engineer; "and it would
seem that nature wished to prove that it was so by making the diamond,
which is simply pure carbon crystallised."

"You don't mea