“But,” went on the Captain, “in spite of this auroral light and the moonlight, the winter was dreary enough. At first we wanted to sleep all the time; and we had much trouble to keep ourselves from giving way to this desire. If we had done so, it would have made us very unhealthy and altogether miserable. We had to keep up our spirits, whatever else we did; and after a while, to help us with this, we got into regular habits; and we set a great clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day.”
“A clock up in the sky!” exclaimed both the boys; “why, Captain Hardy, how was that?”
“Why, don’t you see, my lads, the ‘Great Bear’ and all the other constellations of the north go round and round the Pole-star, which is right above your head; and it so happened that I knew the ‘Great Bear,’ and the two stars in its side called ‘the Pointers’ because they point to the Pole-star. Now these two ‘Pointers,’ going around once in the four-and-twenty hours, pointed up from the south at one time, and up from the north at another time, and up from the east and from the west in the same way; and thus you see we had a clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day, for we had an iceberg picked out all around for every hour, and when ‘the Pointers’ stood over that particular berg we knew what time it was.
“We should have got along through the winter much more comfortably if we had had some books, or some paper to write on, and pen and ink to write with; but these things were quite beyond the reach of our ingenuity. So our life was very monotonous; doing our daily duties,—that is, whatever we might find to do,—and, after wading through the deep snow in doing it, we came back again to our little hut to get warm, and to eat and talk and sleep.
“And much talking we did, as I can assure you, about each other, and each other’s life, and what great things we would do when we got away from the island, hopeless though that seemed. Thus we came gradually to know each other’s history, and thus there came to be greater sympathy between us, and more indulgence of each other’s whims and fancies, as we got better and better acquainted.
“The Dean had quite a story to relate of himself. He told me that he was born in the great city of New York. His father died before he could remember, and his mother was very poor; but so long as she kept her health she managed, in one way or another, to live along from day to day by sewing; and she managed, too, to send the Dean to school. She loved her bright-haired little boy so very, very much that she would have spent the last cent she could ever earn, could she only give her darling Dean a little knowledge that might help him on in the world when he grew to be a man. And so she stinted herself and saved, all unknown to her darling Dean; and she had not clothing or fire enough to keep her warm in the bleak winter, when the Dean was out, though she had a fine fire when the Dean came back. All would have been well enough if the poor woman had not, with her hard work and her efforts to save, become thin and weak, and then grown sick with fever; and now there was nothing for her but the hospital, for there was no money to pay for medicines, or doctor’s bills, to say nothing of rent and fire and clothes.
“And now for the first time the Dean began to realize the situation; and a vague impression crossed his mind, that the poor, pale woman, now restless with pain on a narrow bed in a great long ward of a dreary hospital,—his own dear mother, suffering here with strange hands only to comfort her,—had been brought to this for his sake; and when she grew better, after a long, long time, but was still far from well, he thought and thought, and cried and cried, and prayed and prayed, and wished that he might do something to show his gratitude, and make amends.
“By and by he got into a factory, and worked there early and late, until he too grew sick, and was carried to the hospital, and was laid beside his poor sick mother, on a narrow bed. But he soon got well again, though his mother did not, and then (he could do nothing else) he went to sea as cabin-boy of a ship sailing to Havana; and he came back too; and, with a proud heart beating in his little breast, he carried a little purse of gold and silver coins that the captain gave him to his poor sick mother; and then he went away again on the same ship, and came back once more with another purse of money, twice as big as the first; but the good captain that had been so kind to him, and rewarded him so well, fell sick, and died of yellow fever on the passage home, and the mate, who got command of the ship, being a different sort of man, disliked the Dean, and told him not to come back any more. And so the poor Dean didn’t know what to do; until one of his old shipmates met him in the street, and took him off to New Bedford, and shipped him as cabin-boy of the Blackbird. ‘And now here I am,’ said the poor little Dean, ‘and all the rest you know,—cast away in the cold, in this awful place, while my poor sick mother has no money and no friends in all the world, and is thinking all the time what a wretch I am to run away and desert her, when, God knows, I meant to do nothing of the sort!’ and so the Dean burst out crying, and, to tell you the truth, I could not help crying a little too.
“But the Dean was a right plucky little fellow, I can tell you; and so full of hope and ambition was he, that nothing could keep him down very long; and nothing, I believe, could ever make him despond for a single minute but thinking of his mother, sick and far away, without friends or money, lying on a narrow bed, all through the weary, dreary days and nights, in the dreary ward of a crowded hospital. Poor Dean! he had something to make him cry, and something always to make him sad, if he had a mind to be; but what had I in comparison?—I who had gone away from home with no good motive like the Dean’s.
“After the recital of this story of the Dean’s, we were both very sad, until the Dean suddenly roused himself, and said, ‘Let’s go and look at our traps, Hardy’; and so we sallied out into the moonlight, and waded through the snow, to see if there were any foxes for us. To get outside our hut was not so easy a matter now as it was when we first built it; for, in order to keep the cold winds away, we had made a long, low, narrow passage, with a crook in it, through which we crawled on our hands and knees, before we reached the door.