"After this the imprecations of Urbain, chiefly against the captain, became loud, deep, and horrible; but luckily for us most of them were uttered in French. Ere long the savage fellow’s mood seemed to change; he wept, and to our surprise offered to carry Willy, on one condition, that one of us carried his musket; and then once more, guided now by the direction in which the sun had set, we continued our pilgrimage towards the south. "Urbain’s vast strength seemed to have departed now; he was incapable of keeping up with us, and began to lag more and more behind, so that we had frequently to wait for him, as we were too feeble to call, and Willy, who feared him greatly, implored us not to leave them. "On these occasions Urbain’s old devilish temper became roused, and he broke forth into oaths, and even threats; so, ultimately, we left him to proceed at his own slow pace as we struggled towards a wood, dragging with us a seaman named Tom Dacres, who had been no longer able to abstain from swallowing snow, by which his mouth was almost immediately swollen, while he became speechless and all but paralysed. "Yet on and on we toiled, dragging him by turns, our weary limbs sinking deep at every step. When I look back to those sufferings, I frequently think that I must have been partially insane; but it would seem that, like one in a dream, I went through all the formula of life like a sane person. "On reaching the thicket, it proved to be one of old and half-decayed firs; then we proceeded to suck portions of the bark greedily. After this we became aware, for the first time, of the absence of Urbain Gautier and little Willy. "They had disappeared in the twilight!" Here Captain Binnacle interrupted his narrative by expressing a fear that he wearied us; but we begged of him to proceed, as we were anxious to know how those adventures ended by the shore of the Unexplored Lake. *CHAPTER XXVII.* A still small voice spoke unto me, "Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be!" Then to the still small voice I said, "Let me not cast in endless shade What is so wonderfully made." TENNYSON. "Nestling close to a rock, from the side of which the snow formed an arch, we found some moss, which we ate with avidity, and then some sprigs of savine, which generally grows in the clefts of the rocks all over the island and the Labrador coast, yielding the berry from which the spruce beer is made. With tears of thankfulness we devoured them, and were surmising what had become of Urbain, when about nine o’clock by the captain’s watch he appeared, but without Scotch Willy, who had, he said, died about an hour ago, and been buried by him among the snow. "’Where?’ asked the captain, in a low voice, for Dacres, and two others of our famine-stricken band, were in a dying condition. "’Did you observe an old peeled trunk of a tree about a mile distant?’ "’Yes.’