"The bullet entered his mouth, and passed out of the base of the skull behind, injuring the brain in its passage, and destroying him instantly.
"So Captain Benson told me, for I never looked on his face again, though I have often seen it since in my dreams.
"About two hours after this summary act of justice we were found and relieved by a travelling party of Indians, Micmacs, who come from the continent of America at times, and domicile themselves chiefly along the western shore of the island, to hunt the beaver by the banks of the Serpentine Lake.
"They conveyed us through the fur country of the Buenoventura people to the miserable little settlement of that name, where we remained till the ice broke up, when we were taken to St. John's in a seal-fisher.
"There our perils and suffering ended. We had shipped on board different crafts for different countries, and the next year saw me appointed captain of this clipper-ship, the Pride of the Ocean."[*]
[*] A character not unlike Urbain Gautier figures in the account of the first or second expedition of Sir John Franklin.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Pass we the long, unvarying course, the track
Oft trod, that never leaves a trace behind;
Pass we the calm, the gale, the change, the tack,
And each well-known caprice of wave and wind,
Cooped in their winged sea-girt citadel;
The foul, the fair, the contrary, the kind,
As breezes rise and fall, and billows swell,
Till on some jocund morn—lo, land! and all is well.
BYRON.
Pleasantly we traversed the almost tideless waters of the Mediterranean, the great inland sea of Europe.
We generally had a fair wind; but in our tacks southward and northward more than once we sighted the shores of Europe on one side, and those of Africa on the other.