It was tedious work all this, but it came to an end at last, and the water being now more open, the rudder was re-shipped, and more sail clapped on, so that much better way was made.
Another week passed by. They were well south now in Davis Straits, albeit the wind had been somewhat fickle.
They had high hopes of soon seeing the last of the ice, and both Douglas and Leonard began to think of home, and talk of it also.
It was spring time once more. The larches, at all events, would be green and tasselled with crimson in the woods around Glen Lyle, primroses would be peeping out in cosy corners in moss-bedded copses, and birds would be busy building, and the trees alive with the voice of song.
“In three weeks more,” said Douglas, “we ought to be stretching away across the blue Atlantic, and within a measurable distance of dear old Scotland.”
“Ay, lad!” replied Leonard, “my heart jumps to my mouth with very joy to think of it.”
In this great chart that lies before me, a chart of the Polar regions, I can point out the very place, or near it, where the Fairy Queen was crushed in the ice as a strong man might crush a walnut, and sank like a stone in the water, dragging down with her, so quickly did she go at last, more than one of her brave crew, whose bones may lie in the black depths of that inhospitable ocean,—
“Till the sea gives up its dead.”