Of the three wanderers Absalom Schanck is the only experienced traveller. He is a naturalised Englishman, and a captain in the merchant navy; having traded prosperously for some years as the owner of a ship—a sea-carrier in a small way—he had sold his vessel, and built himself a water-side villa at Battersea, half Hamburgian, half nautical in design; a cross between a house in Hamburg and half-a-dozen ships’ cabins packed neatly together; everything planned with as strict an economy of space as if the dainty little habitation were destined to put to sea as soon as she was finished. As many shelves and drawers and hatches in the kitchen as in a steward’s cabin; stairs winding up the heart of the house, like a companion-ladder; a flat roof, from which Mr. Schanck can see the sunset beyond the westward-lying swamps of Fulham, and which he fondly calls the admiral’s poop. But even this comfortable habitation has palled upon the mind of the professional rover. Dull are those suburban flats to the eye that for twenty years has ranged over the vast and various ocean. Absalom has found the consolation of pipe and case-bottle inadequate; and with speculative ideas of the vaguest nature, has joined Geoffrey Hossack’s expedition to the Far West. CHAPTER II. ‘MUSIC HATH CHARMS.’ Ten days go by, empty days of which only Lucius Davoren keeps a record, in a journal which may serve by and by for a history of the ill-fated expedition; which may be found perchance by some luckier sportsmen in years to come, when the ink upon the paper has gone gray and pale, and when the date of each entry has an ancient look, and belongs to a bygone century; nay, when the very fashion of the phrases is obsolete. Lucius takes note of everything, every cloud in the sky, every red gleam of the aurora, with its ghostly rustling sound, as of phantom trees shaken by the north wind. He finds matter for observation where to the other two there seems only an endless blank, a universe that is emptied of everything except the unvarying pine-trees rising dark against a background of everlasting snow.