"Keep up your heart, my dear sir," said he. "Keep up your courage
and your heart."

"My heart!" I cried. "It's at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."

He was the first to whom I had said as much. He was a stranger.
What did it matter? And, oh, it was so true - so true.

Every day and all day I was thinking of my love; every hour and all
hours she was before me with her sunny hair and young, young face.
Her wistful eyes were gazing into mine continually. Their
wistfulness I had never realized at the time; but now I did; and I
saw it for what it seemed always to have been, the soft, sad,
yearning look of one fated to die young. So young - so young! And
I might live to be an old man, mourning her.

That I should never love again I knew full well. This time there
was no mistake. I have implied, I believe, that it was for another
woman I fled originally to the diggings. Well, that one was still
unmarried, and when the papers were full of me she wrote me a letter
which I now believe to have been merely kind. At the time I was all
uncharitableness; but words of mine would fail to tell you how cold
this letter left me; it was as a candle lighted in the full blaze
of the sun.

With all my bitterness, however, you must not suppose that I had
quite lost the feelings which had inspired me at sunset on the
lonely ocean, while my mind still held good. I had been too near
my Maker ever to lose those feelings altogether. They were with
me in the better moments of these my worst days. I trusted His