with tears of penitence, to return, to confess all, to purchase back the miniature from Williams with money I had won.  And, with this resolve, I started back to England.  On arriving, I took up a newspaper, and you may judge the terror I felt as I read the account of Williams’s awful death with the miniature upon him.  It staggered me, but it did not melt my heart.  I interpreted it that my plans were frustrated, as I found that Dr. Brier had obtained possession of the miniature.  I dared not remain in the country, for fear of discovery and of identification with the crime of Williams; but I could not tear myself away until I had once more visited the neighborhood of the dear old school-house.

I cannot think without emotion of that moonlight night when I lay down beside the marble pillar which tender hearts had caused to be placed there, “In loving memory of D.M.”  Oh, my father, how true it is that “the way of transgressors is hard!” I thought my heart would break as I lay there on the cold earth and wept the bitterest tears I ever shed.

If I could but have caught sight of Dr. Brier, or felt the motherly touch of Mrs. Brier’s hand upon my shoulder,—­if I could but have heard the ring of Howard’s or Martin’s voice in the play-ground, I felt as if the evil within me would have taken flight and I should have risen up a regenerated man.

    But I was alone.  Dead! dead!  And I went away with my heart cold and
    sad, and my future all dark and purposeless.

    A twelvemonth ago I fell in with some Shetlanders who were about to
    start on a whaling cruise, and, as the expedition promised plenty
    of adventure and excitement, I joined them.

    Three months after we left Shetland, we were fast in the ice.  For
    nine months and more we have been almost starving, and have had to
    endure bodily suffering in other respects of a most severe kind.

    I have written the foregoing part of my story at intervals, and I
    would now bring it to a conclusion, for the ice is breaking up, and
    we have before us our last chance.

Literature has been very scarce on board, and I had only brought one book with me.  It was Howard Pemberton’s Bible.  I found it in the coat I had taken accidentally on the morning I left Blackrock school, and I never parted with it, hoping I might be able to restore it some day, for I found it was a sacred relic given to him by his father, and bearing in its cover his portrait and a copy of the dying words he spoke to Howard.

That book became my friend, and it led me to recognize a friend in its Divine author.  I had striven in vain to save myself from myself.  This book pointed me the way.  I should never have read it, however if it had not been for the kind sympathy of our captain.  A nobler man, or a truer Christian, I never met.

But our captain died, and my strength