We have now for some time followed the old man through the recital of the wonderful adventures which befell himself and the Dean on the lonely little island in the Arctic Sea; and we have watched the children going and coming from day to day. And we have seen, too, how happy the children were when listening to the story, and how delighted they were with every little scrap they got of it, and how they remembered every word of it, and how William wrote it down in black and white, and had it safe and sound for future use,—little dreaming, at the time of doing it, that the record he was keeping would find its way at last into a book, and thus give other children than himself and Fred and Alice a chance to make the acquaintance of the good old Captain and the brave and handsome little Dean.
And William Earnest kept his record regularly, and he kept it well, as we have seen before; and up to this point of time everything was set down with day and date. But now a change had clearly come over the habits of our little party. At first, as has been hitherto related, the old Captain was a little shy of the children, though he so much liked them; but now all formality was gone between them, and so down the children came to the Captain’s cottage whenever they had a mind. The Captain was always glad to see them, be it morning, noon, or evening; and never were the children, in all their lives before, so happy as when romping through the Captain’s grounds, or cooling themselves upon the grass beneath the Captain’s trees, or looking at the Captain’s “traps” or joking with that oddest boy that was ever seen, Main Brace, or playing with the Captain’s dogs,—the biggest dogs that ever bore the odd names of Port and Starboard.
The Captain now said, “Make yourselves at home, my dears,—quite at home”; and the children did it; and the Captain always went about whatever he had to do until he was ready once more to begin his story-telling; and then they would all rush off to the yacht, or to the “Crow’s Nest,” or the “cabin,” or the “quarter-deck,” or some other pleasant place; and as the Captain related something more and more extraordinary, as it seemed to them, each time,
“the wonder grew
That one small head should carry all he knew”;
while, as for the old man himself, he might well exclaim, with the lover in the play, “I were but little happy if I could say how much.”
Thus it came about, as we have good reason to suppose, that days and dates were lost in William’s journal; and thus it was that the young and truthful chronicler of this veritable history simply wrote down, from time to time, what the Captain said, without mentioning much about when it was that the Captain said it. Sometimes he wrote with lead pencil, sometimes with pen and ink, and often, as is plain to see from the manuscript itself, at considerable intervals of time; but always, as there is no doubt, with accuracy; for William’s mind, touching the Captain’s adventures, was like the susceptible heart of the Count in the Venetian story, “wax to receive and marble to retain.”
So now, after this long explanation, the reader will perceive that we can do nothing else than report the Captain’s story, without always saying where the little party were seated at the time the Captain told it. And, in truth, it matters little; at least so William thought, for he wrote one day upon the page,—
“Where’s the use, I’d like to know, putting in what Fred and me and Alice did, and where we went with the ‘ancient mariner’; I haven’t time to write so much, and I’ll only write what the Captain said”; and so right away he set down what follows.
“Now you see,” resumed the Captain, “when we had done all I told you of before,—having slept, you know, and got well rested,—we went about our work very hopefully. But as we were going along, meditating on our plans, the Dean stopped suddenly, and said he to me: ‘Hardy, do you know what day it is?’