Intrepid! have they really deserted us?  We have served them so well, and have they really left us alone?  A great many were away travelling last year, but they came home.  Will not any of these come home now?” No, poor “Resolute”!  Not one of them ever came back again!  Not one of them meant to.  Summer came.  August came.  No one can tell how soon, but some day or other this her icy prison broke up, and the good ship found herself on her own element again; shook herself proudly, we cannot doubt, nodded joyfully across to the “Intrepid,” and was free.  But alas! there was no master to take latitude and longitude, no helmsman at the wheel.  In clear letters cast in brass over her helm there are these words, “England expects each man to do his duty.”  But here is no man to heed the warning, and the rudder flaps this way and that way, no longer directing her course, but stupidly swinging to and fro.  And she drifts here and there,—­drifts out of sight of her little consort,—­strands on a bit of ice floe now, and then is swept off from it,—­and finds herself, without even the “Intrepid’s” company, alone on these blue seas with those white shores.  But what utter loneliness!  Poor “Resolute “!  She longed for freedom,—­but what is freedom where there is no law?  What is freedom without a helmsman!  And the “Resolute” looks back so sadly to the old days when she had a master.  And the short bright summer passes.  And again she sees the sun set from her decks.  And now even her topmasts see it set.  And now it does not rise to her deck.  And the next day it does not rise to her topmast.  Winter and night together!  She has known them before!  But now it is winter and night and loneliness all together.  This horrid ice closes up round her again.  And there is no one to bring her into harbor,—­she is out in the open sound.  If the ice drifts west, she must go west.  If it goes east, she must east.  Her seeming freedom is over, and for that long winter she is chained again.  But her heart is true to old England.  And when she can go east, she is so happy! and when she must go west, she is so sad!  Eastward she does go!  Southward she does go!  True to the instinct which sends us all home, she tracks undirected and without a sail fifteen hundred miles of that sea, without a beacon, which separates her from her own.  And so goes a dismal year.  “Perhaps another spring they will come and find me out, and fix things below.  It is getting dreadfully damp down there; and I cannot keep the guns bright and the floors dry,” No, good old “Resolute.”  May and June pass off the next year, and nobody comes; and here you are all alone out in the bay, drifting in this dismal pack.  July and August,—­the days are growing shorter again.  “Will nobody come and take care of me, and cut off these horrid blocks of ice, and see to these sides of bacon in the hold, and all these mouldy sails, and this powder, and the bread and the spirit that I have kept for them so well?  It is September, and the sun begins