and had troubles that wa'n't going to let him live a great while.
It used to ease his mind to talk to an understanding person, so we
used to sit and talk together all day, if it rained or blew so that
we couldn't get out. I'd got a bad blow on the back of my head at
the time we came ashore, and it pained me at times, and my strength
was broken, anyway; I've never been so able since."

Captain Littlepage fell into a reverie.

"Then I had the good of my reading," he explained presently.
"I had no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his
books were foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember.
The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a
man. I was well acquainted with the works of Milton, but up there
it did seem to me as if Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea
terms very accurate, and some beautiful passages were calming to
the mind. I could say them over until I shed tears; there was
nothing beautiful to me in that place but the stars above and those
passages of verse.

"Gaffett was always brooding and brooding, and talking to
himself; he was afraid he should never get away, and it preyed upon
his mind. He thought when I got home I could interest the
scientific men in his discovery: but they're all taken up with
their own notions; some didn't even take pains to answer the
letters I wrote. You observe that I said this crippled man Gaffett
had been shipped on a voyage of discovery. I now tell you that the
ship was lost on its return, and only Gaffett and two officers were
saved off the Greenland coast, and he had knowledge later that
those men never got back to England; the brig they shipped on was