5. "Thine eye may weary, but the line must stand; Thy thought may change, but here 't is traced in light ; The fairest touches wrought by childish hand May yet offend thy manhood's fairer sight. 6. "Nay, school thy hand, and wait a future day, 7. O daily life! thy fair and crystal page By erring hands is written o'er and o'er, In deeds that live beyond the present age, In characters that stand for evermore. 8. We can not pause. 'Tis not for human will To check the pen or shun its solemn trust; But living souls, discerning good and ill, May leave their records beautiful and just. 9. The immortal truth demands each thoughtful hour, LESSON LXXXVII. AN ARCTIC ADVENTURE. 1. In the autumn of 1871 an American vessel named the Polaris * sailed on a voyage of discovery to the Arctic regions, the object of the voyage being to ascertain the existence and *Polaris is the name applied by astronomers to the star situated very near the North Pole of the heavens, and hence generally called the Pole Star. true place of the Open Polar Sea alleged to have been discovered in previous voyages to the north. After a short time, this vessel disappeared from sight and knowledge in the awful Arctic solitudes; and the general world, sowing and reaping, and gathering into barns, forgot her very existence. 2. The few who remembered it government officers, scientific men, editors, and the wives and children of her little crew hoped, and feared, and waited, trusting in the courage and the skill of Captain Hall and the excellent outfit of the ship, not knowing, for all that, that, when men come back from expeditions to the Pole, it is as if they rose from the dead. 3. Out of the silence of two years there came whispered news from the ghostly ship. She had sailed farther into the frozen waste than bark had sailed before. Her captain, not content with that, and impatient for a glimpse of the warm sea, the thought of whose ebb and flow had all his life so lured his imagination, had pushed on with sledges to a point never reached by man. Returning, eager and exultant, and sure that he saw the beginning of the end, he was taken suddenly ill and died. It is a weird picture, that of the men toiling for two days to open a grave four feet deep, and laying their leader down in the lonely shadow of the Arctic night. But it is never sorrowful that a man should give his life for an idea; and no other end but that of triumphant discovery could fitly have closed the days of the heroic dreamer. 4. That winter the Polaris lay on her beam-ends among the icebergs. Through one hundred and thirty-five days of darkness, her men waited with cheerful patience for the kindly sun. In August the ice broke a little, and they started for the south. In October a great gale caught them, and threw the ship on her beam-ends upon an ice-floe. It seemed that she must go to pieces, and orders were given to land the provisions and trust to the perilous chance of the ice-field. When half the work was done, that great mass on which the ship rested crashed off, and she took the water, drifting rapidly northward with fourteen souls on board. little babe two months old. 5. On the ice-floe were eighteen persons, and among them a They had provisions, and they looked to be rescued in the morning, and the first night passed not wearily. But the next day, though the Polaris came in sight, under full sail and steam, she passed off to the east of them, helpless against the driving ice, and was gone. In that wide world of frozen night they were adrift. They had food for one month. Captain Tyson said, "We must scrimp, and make it serve for five months." They had no shelter. Captain Tyson said, "We must build snow-huts." 6. The floe broke again and again. But under Captain Tyson's vigilant care they saved their scanty stores. Sometimes they shot a bear or a seal, and then they were full fed, and even had the luxury of a light. Sometimes, for days and days, their fare was scanty bread and the drip of melted ice. Sometimes the freezing sea washed over them, and they clung by ropes to the boat-load of stores. 7. On Christmas Day they had a royal feast of a few thin slices of their last ham and two small biscuits apiece. On New Year's Day they had only pemmican and water. Yet through all this time of aimless, helpless midnight drifting, these men and women seem never to have lost courage. As they floated in the darkness whither the wind swept them, one of the women often sang the few songs they all knew, and the rest of them made such chorus as they could. 8. On the 19th of January they saw the sun again, after months of darkness. In the sunlight they still drifted, as they had drifted in the dark, through leagues on leagues of icebergs and choked sea, seeing now such splendors of light and color as the tropics do not show; seeing, also, what before they had only felt, the imminent peril which beset them from every In toppling crag, and swollen billow, and melting ice-field. March they shot seal and a bear, and were thankful for such luxury. 9. In April came great gales of wind from the south, rending the ice-floes like paper. They scrambled from piece to piece as they might. Cold, hungry, drenched to the skin, they still believed in rescue, and still clung together. On the 28th of April they had floated down to leads of open water. The ice-raft had dwindled from five miles across to twenty yards. Their stores were gone. The open boat was their only hope. In the afternoon they saw a sail, neared it, and fancied they were saved; but they lost it in the fog. 10. All that night they watched, with life and death in the balance. With daylight they set their colors, hoisted a black blanket on two oars, rowed as madmen, shouted, prayed, and wept; but the steamer never saw them, and slowly vanished. For the first time they despaired. On the third morning, at five o'clock, the fog, lifting, revealed the little tragic speck to be the sealing steamer Tigress, lying three miles off. In half an hour their journey of two thousand miles on an ice-floe was ended. 11. Has this story a moral? Is it that the Arctic problem can not be solved? Is it an order to stop the waste of such splendid courage and heroism in a world which sadly needs it all? Or is it, rather, that, since we have but one life here, it can not be put to better uses than the serving of mankind in the opening of new knowledge? What the value of Arctic discovery may be, no man can say until expeditions like these have gathered many facts together. 12. But of the value of daring, of enthusiasm, of patient endurance, of the strength to face cheerfully the wearing misery of cold, darkness, starvation, of the friendliness which never faltered in those six horrible months, there is no doubt. "Grandeur of character," says Emerson, "acts in the dark, and succors those who never saw it." And there is not a man of us all who may not find his private sermon of unselfishness, patience, heroism, in that episode of the rude lives of common sailors and unkempt Esquimaux who made up the crew of the Polar Drift. Christian Union. Adapted. WORD ANALYSIS AND DEFINITIONS. Ep'i sode, an incident separate from the main story, but related to it. Ice' berg (berg, a mountain), a mountain of ice, floating on the ocean. Ice'-floe or Ice-float; a large mass of floating ice. Pem' mi can, preserved meat. Un kempt (kemb, a comb), not combed; rough in appearance. LESSON LXXXVIII. A WINTER EVENING'S REFLECTIONS. 1 Shut in from all the world without, 2. The house-dog, on his paws outspread, |