“Mother,” said Claude one evening, “I’m going to be a sailor.”
“Dear boy,” replied his mother, “what has put such a notion in your head?”
“My bird, perhaps, mother,” said the boy, smiling.
“No, Claude, but those books you pore over. Dear boy, hardly half of what you read bears any resemblance to the truth.”
“Oh, mother,” cried the boy, “if only one half is true I must go and see that half I’m a good sailor already; you know how I enjoyed that voyage down the Mediterranean. I dream of all I saw even till this day. Mother, I must go to sea.
“Mother,” he said again, after a long pause, during which Lady Alwyn was musing, and very sad and gloomy were her thoughts—“mother, do you know where my bird came from?”
“It came from the wild mysterious region around the Pole.”
“Yes, I have been reading about that too, reading about it until I seem to have spent years and years of my life in the country. I have but to shut my eyes, any time I wish, and such pictures rise up before me as few but sailors ever see the reality of.”
Young Claude placed one hand across his eyes as he spoke.
“Here it is again, mother, a vast and lonely trackless waste of snow; great glaciers, against whose sides mountain waves for ever dash and foam; icebergs whose pinnacled heads taper upwards into a sky of cloudless blue. Fields of ice on which white bears roam; dark, inky seas where the walrus plays and tumbles, and through which the solitude-loving narwhal pursues his finny prey; and crystalline caves where sea-bears roar. But the scene is changed: it is night—the long, long, Polar night. Oh, how bright and beautiful the Aurora, with its ever-changing tints of crimson, green, and blue; and the stars, how near they seem; and the silence, how deep, how awful! But see, a storm is coming across the pack, and clouds are banking up and hiding the glorious Aurora; now it is on us, and higher than the stars rise the clouds of whirling, drifting snow. Hark! how the wind howls! There is danger on its wings; there is—”