Their own country! Well, they seemed to have conquered it, but it was God’s country—the country of the Power which is working out the destiny of this world, and every planet and sun-star we see around us in the solemnity of a winter’s night—He has placed the finger of death upon this Great White Land, and it lies sealed in eternal snows. Ah! no, though, not eternal!
There will come a time when all will be changed, for matter cannot die.
How silent! It is a silence that eternals the very heart, and takes possession of the soul.
Not a sound to be heard! Yes, for up the mountain-side comes now the joyous bark of honest Collie.
And so, the flag being planted, Ingomar and Curtis came slowly down the hill.
CHAPTER IX
TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS—VICTORY
There was much talk of home to-night, between Curtis and Ingomar. The former told his friend all about his English roof-tree, and cheerfully of his doings while living there as a boy, all his sports, and fun, and play, and his practical jokes on the old gardener. About the horses his father rode to the hounds, and about the hounds themselves. There had only been two in the family, two children, I mean, and sister had a pony as well as he, and, oh! the glorious scampers they had had over his father’s wide and beautiful estate, which usually ended, he said, in getting into grief or trouble.
But father was dead, and mother and sister too, and although the land was now his, somehow he did not care to go back and live there. It would be so sad and lonesome. It was grief that had caused him to work so hard, and to take to the study of the sciences, even when but a small cadet on board the old Britannia.
“For study, my friend, will kill care, or lessen it. Is it not so, Ingomar?”