the waste of waters from his high station on the poop of his ship,
and sees the first uncertain glimmer of the light, 'rising and
falling with the waves, like a torch in the bark of some
fisherman,' which is the shining star of a new world. Bruce is
caged in Abyssinia, surrounded by the gory horrors which shall
often startle him out of his sleep at home when years have passed
away. Franklin, come to the end of his unhappy overland journey -
would that it had been his last! - lies perishing of hunger with
his brave companions: each emaciated figure stretched upon its
miserable bed without the power to rise: all, dividing the weary
days between their prayers, their remembrances of the dear ones at
home, and conversation on the pleasures of eating; the last-named
topic being ever present to them, likewise, in their dreams. All
the African travellers, wayworn, solitary and sad, submit
themselves again to drunken, murderous, man-selling despots, of the
lowest order of humanity; and Mungo Park, fainting under a tree and
succoured by a woman, gratefully remembers how his Good Samaritan
has always come to him in woman's shape, the wide world over.

A shadow on the wall in which my mind's eye can discern some traces
of a rocky sea-coast, recalls to me a fearful story of travel
derived from that unpromising narrator of such stories, a
parliamentary blue-book. A convict is its chief figure, and this
man escapes with other prisoners from a penal settlement. It is an
island, and they seize a boat, and get to the main land. Their way
is by a rugged and precipitous sea-shore, and they have no earthly
hope of ultimate escape, for the party of soldiers despatched by an
easier course to cut them off, must inevitably arrive at their
distant bourne long before them, and retake them if by any hazard
they survive the horrors of the way. Famine, as they all must have