But why continue the pitiful chronicle?  To tell the story in detail is impossible here—­to tell it baldly and hurriedly, means to omit from it all that makes the narrative of the last days of the Greely expedition worth reading; the unflagging courage of most of the men, the high sense of honor that characterized them, the tenderness shown to the sick and helpless, the pluck and endurance of Long and Brainard, the fierce determination of Greely, that come what might, the records of his expedition should be saved, and its honor bequeathed unblemished to the world.  And so through suffering and death, despairing perhaps, but never neglecting through cowardice or lethargy, any expedient for winning the fight against death, the party, daily growing smaller, fought its way on through winter and spring, until that memorable day in June, when Colwell cut open the tent and saw, as the first act of the rescued sufferers, two haggard, weak, and starving men pouring all that was left of the brandy, down the throat of one a shade more haggard and weak than they.

Men of English lineage are fond of telling the story of the meeting of Stanley and Dr. Livingston in the depths of the African jungle.  For years Livingston had disappeared from the civilized world.  Everywhere apprehension was felt lest he had fallen a victim to the ferocity of the savages, or to the pestilential climate.  The world rung with speculations concerning his fate.  Stanley, commissioned to solve the mystery, by the same America journalist who sent DeLong into the Arctic, had cut his path through the savages and the jungle, until at the door of a hut in a clearing, he saw a white man who could be none but him whom he sought, for in all that dark and gloomy forest there was none other of white skin.  Then Anglo-Saxon stolidity asserted itself.  Men of Latin race would have rushed into each others’ arms with loud rejoicings.  Not so these twain.

“Dr. Livingston, I believe,” said the newcomer, with the air of greeting an acquaintance on Fifth Avenue.  “I am Mr. Stanley.”

“I am glad to see you,” was the response, and it might have taken place in a drawing-room for all the emotion shown by either man.

[Illustration:  AN ESQUIMAU]

That was a dramatic meeting in the tropical jungles, but history will not give second place to the encounter of the advance guard of the Greely relief expedition with the men they sought.  The story is told with dramatic directness in Commander (now Admiral) Schley’s book, “The Rescue of Greely.”

“It was half-past eight in the evening as the cutter steamed around the rocky bluff of Cape Sabine, and made her way to the cove, four miles further on, which Colwell remembered so well....  The storm which had been raging with only slight intervals since early the day before, still kept up, and the wind was driving in bitter gusts through the opening in the ridge that followed the coast to the westward.