Falcon. I felt that I was drifting to westward, being carried away
in the grip of one of those mysterious ocean currents that are the
terror of the northern latitudes.

On the fourth day of my lonely voyage I was oppressed by a deep
sense of the danger of my situation. I realized that I had missed
the Shetlands; that I could now do no more than abandon myself to
the will of the wind, and trust to falling in with some vessel that
might be making for the Faroe Islands or for Iceland. If I had had
a companion to take watch about with me I might have got along
fairly well; but with my hard work of trimming the sails, and
battling with the fitful winds, I could not do without sleep, and
during my hours of sleep the schooner always fell off her course,
and I could make no reckoning.

Day followed day, and my situation underwent no visible change,
excepting only that the temperature became ever colder and colder,
that the snow fell more constantly, and that the mist hemmed me in
more closely. Sometimes at midday the mist would lift and I saw
around me the great wide stretch of desolate sea, with an ice floe
floating here and there. On one such occasion I fancied I saw land
on the windward bow, a white mountainous peak rose high in air,
and, not knowing where I might be, I took it to be one of the
joekulls of Iceland. But, alas! it proved to be but an immense
iceberg.

In my solitude I naturally thought much of my home, now so far
away, and of my dear mother and sister, and their prayers for my
safety. For their sakes I dreaded to think that I might never
return to them again.

I thought, too, of Thora, and wondered many times if she was
better, or if her illness had taken her away.

I had before found comfort in the thought that she was protected by
the viking's stone. But, probably, I now needed its mystic help
even more than she.

One afternoon--I think it must have been about the twentieth day of
my loneliness--I had been asleep for some three hours, and in a
kind of waking dream I saw a strange vague vision. A number of
persons, whose faces I could not rightly discern, were in a large
room. Amongst them was Thora, looking more beautiful than I had
ever seen her in my life, and she stood pointing with an accusing
finger at her brother Tom, at whose feet there crouched a lean dog,
snarling at him.

I was awakened from my half sleep by the noise of a crackling and
scraping of ice upon the schooner's sides. I had se