day without an end. I didn't know one day from another, and I cared less. Still, tired out as I was, I thought I couldn't sleep. I knew the doctor had a lot of little bottles and things in his dispensary, as he called the locker beside his bunk in the cabin, and it struck me one or other of them might be of use. With that another notion began for to creep into my head. I'm not going to tell you what that was, for it's not good for youngsters to hear of, nor, it's to be hoped, few of you young gentlemen will ever be in my case. But it kept a-wriggling and coming along at me, and when I tried to close my eyes to sleep, it was all the worse. What saved me, I believe, was just this, that I durstn't for the world have used any freedom with his belongings, no, nor so much as gone down aft.

One of the two dogs, the Esquimaux one, called Kanyok, was a big senseless brute, except where his stomach was concerned. He was the one that had gone after uncle and the men on the ice, and came back only because he lost track of them. Likewise he bothered me now with his howlings, which was all he seemed able to do. I could have taken up a pistol and shot him on the spot. Meantime the other one came looking up in my face wistful like, till I could stand it no longer, but broke down blubbering like a child. Before I knew, she had her head down at my face, licking at it, with her paws about my neck, every now and

then keeping up a sort of a whimper and a hum, as tender as could be.

She was the one that had stayed aboard of her own free will. She was something between a shepherd and a water dog, I believe, and wonderful wise in many ways, the doctor having brought her from his own part of the north country. Tweed was her name, and very fond her master had been of her, and she still more so in return. However, you would have thought she was a-crying of herself to sleep; and she did the same for me beyond doubt.

'Twas a sound sleep I had, that. It must have been a pretty long one, too. For anything that I knew of life or my troubles, it might have been all over with me; but I was wakened up by a loud voice calling my name down the fore-peak scuttle where I was. It was my first name that was called, and the voice was the doctor's, only more commanding like. I made but two springs up the ladder to the deck, and looked round and aloft. There was nothing earthly to be seen, but I ran to the cabin companion, and stopped at the head of the stair. The tide being at the slack, and the ice at a standstill, everything was most awful quiet. It must have been night, though not very dark, for the northern streamers were shooting overhead, and the ice and the water together kept up a gleam. Right up through the midst of it there was something that had gone aloft with a rustle, and if ever

a spirit was seen, my belief is, I had seen one then.

I believe in such things, mind you, and so do many that know a great deal better than you or I. At the same time, I'm just as confident they are never permitted to appear except for a good end. Now there was a good end here, as will be seen. I had a notion of that sort at the moment, consequently was less scared than I might have been. I listened down the skylight, but everything there was most awful still.

I couldn't make out anything that could be wanted for me to do, and if it had been to do below, I wasn't my own man enough to have tried it. I went back to the fore-peak, and, feeling most ravenous for food, ate till I could eat no longer, took a drink, flung myself into an empty bunk, and slept as sound as ever.

It was bright daylight again when I woke. The sunshine came, step by step, right down the ladder, as I well remember, me noť caring about it, till all at once, when it got to me, it lighted up as it were all through me. The tide was rippling strong against the ship's bows, the dogs flying about on deck, snapping and barking at the gulls and other birds that were about. I went up, set about lighting a fire in the caboose, got my breakfast, and began to feel quite different. A thought had come into my mind that I might still get rescued, somehow. The doctor had always looked at this on

the land side, but I began to think there was a little chance seawards. When the fishing season opened, one or other of the whalers might happen to get adrift westward, in which case, by keeping a good look-out, I would see her a long distance off, then make a smoke on the island, and take the boat, if need be. All at once I got a terrible dash to this, and worse, for it brought upon me how regularly lost I was. I neither knew the day of the week, nor of the month, nor the very month itself, except so far as I could make out by signs. What with the time I had slept, and the time since the doctor's death, and the time before when I was nursing at him, it was all a dead reckoning with It might have been two or three days, or it might have been twenty. You've no notion how helpless that makes a man by himself. I ought not to have trusted to any one else as I had done; and that's what I would have you to learn from my case, young gentlemen, although you were lords or bishops either.

me.

What I did was to run straight to the cabin stair, and right down I dived as quick as may be, to see the log the doctor had been keeping, just to know where I was in that respect. There it lay, but nothing entered since the 12th of April, saying he was afraid he was in for fever. How many days

he had been ill I could not say. The very last thing he had asked me to do was to wind up his watch, that hung at his bunk-head-a first-rate

pocket chronometer it was, but it only went thirty hours at most-and there it hung quite quiet.

By the appearance of the weather, as I said. before, things now looked to be summer, but the sou'-west wind and the rain had given over all at once. It was getting clear and sharp again, fewer of the wild geese and ducks flying overhead, and a light northerly air astir. I stood all of a heap, more down-hearted than ever, at the door toward the little after-cabin, which uncle used to keep to himself. Just then I heard something that made me jump. "Tick, tick, tick" it went, and no mistake, and no doubt about it. It was the ship's big chronometer, that went eight days. When uncle went off he had no chance to take it, if so inclined. He had a pocket one of his own, and I knew the doctor had been very particular about the winding, of it up, it being so swung that the accident to the ship had not damaged it. At first sight this confused. me all the more, at the notion that only eight days had passed since Dr Graham could give it his attention. As I was puzzling over the matter, going between the one cabin and the other, all at once the tick stopped. It went to my heart like a knife, I can tell you, that did. But here was the very moment that all began to come right. I could see by the week index when the piece had last been wound up, and that had been on a Friday about breakfast-time.

Now I quite well remember my having woke up