and dreary desolation which results from the total absence of animal
existence. The silence was so oppressive that it was with a feeling of
relief he listened to the low, distant voices of the men as they paused
ever and anon in their busy task to note and remark on the progress of
their work. In the intense cold of an Arctic night the sound of voices
can be heard at a much greater distance than usual, and although the men
were far off, and hummocks of ice intervened between them and Fred,
their tones broke distinctly, though gently, on his ear. Yet these
sounds did not interrupt the unusual stillness. They served rather to
impress him more forcibly with the vastness of that tremendous solitude
in the midst of which he stood.

Gradually his thoughts turned homeward, and he thought of the dear ones
who circled round his own fireside, and perchance talked of him--of the
various companions he had left behind, and the scenes of life and beauty
where he used to wander. But such memories led him irresistibly to the
Far North again; for in all home-scenes the figure of his father started
up, and he was back again in an instant, searching toilsomely among the
floes and icebergs of the Polar Seas. It was the invariable ending of
poor Fred's meditations, and, however successful he might be in
entering for a time into the spirit of fun that characterized most of
the doings of his shipmates, and in following the bent of his own joyous
nature, in the hours of solitude and in the dark night, when no one saw
him, his mind ever reverted to the one engrossing subject, like the
oscillating needle to the Pole.

As he continued to gaze up long and earnestly into the starry sky, his
thoughts began to wander over the past and the present at random, and a
cold shudder warned him that it was time to return to the hut. But the
wandering thoughts and fancies seemed to chain him to the spot, so that