at else
besides, which goods we tied up in bundles wrapped in sailcloth, each
bundle weighing from thirty to forty pounds, to serve as presents to
natives or to trade away with them. When I asked who would carry them,
Kari answered that I should see. This I did at dawn on the following
morning when there arrived upon the shore a great number of men, quite
a hundred indeed, who brought with them two litters made of light wood
jointed like reeds, only harder, in which Kari said he and I were to be
carried. Among these men he parcelled out the loads which they were to
bear upon their heads, and then said that it was time for us to start in
the litters.

So we started, but first I went down into a cabin and kneeling on my
knees, thanked God for having brought me safe so far, and prayed Him
and St. Hubert to protect me on my further wanderings, and if I died, to
receive my soul. This done I left the ship and while the natives bowed
themselves about me, entered my litter, which was comfortable enough,
having grass mats to lie on and other mats for curtains, very finely
woven, so that they would turn even the heaviest rain.

Then away we went, eight men bearing the pole to which each litter was
slung on their shoulders, while others carried the bundles upon their
heads. Our road ran through forest uphill, and on the crest of the first
hill I descended from the litter and looked back.

There in the creek below lay the wreck of the _Blanche_, now but a small
black blot showing against the water, and beyond it the great sea over
which we had travelled. Yonder broken hulk was the last link which bound
me to my distant home thousands of miles across the ocean, that home,
which my heart told me I should never see again, for how could I win
back from a land that no white foot had ever trod?

On the deck of this ship Blanche herself had stood and smiled and
talked, for once we visited it together shortly before our marriage, and
I remembered how I had kissed her in its cabin. Now Blanche was dead
by her own hand and I, the great London merchant, was an outcast among
savages in a country of which I did not even know the name, where
everything was new and different. And there the ship with her rich
cargo, after bearing us so bravely through weeks of tempest, must lie
until she rotted in the sun and rain and never again would my eyes
behold her. Oh! then it was that a sense of all my misery and loneliness
gripped my heart as it had n