The deacon mused in silence for more than five minutes.  Seldom had his thoughts gone over so wide a reach of interests and events in so short a space of time; but the conclusion was clear and decided.

“You ought to know all, Mary, and you shall know all,” he answered, in the manner of a man who had made up his mind beyond appeal.  “Gar’ner has gone a’ter seal to some islands that the Daggett who died here, about a year and a half ago, told me of; islands of which nobody know’d anything, according to his account, but himself.  His shipmates, that saw the place when he saw it, were all dead, afore he let me into the secret.”

“I have long suspected something of the sort, sir, and have also supposed that the people on Martha’s Vineyard had got some news of this place, by the manner in which Captain Daggett has acted.”

“Isn’t it wonderful, gal?  Islands, they tell me, where a schooner can fill up with ile and skins, in the shortest season in which the sun ever shone upon an antarctic summer!  Wonderful! wonderful!”

“Very extraordinary, perhaps; but we should remember, uncle, at how much risk the young men of the country go on these distant voyages, and how dearly their profits are sometimes bought.”

“Bought!  If the schooner would only come back, I should think nothing of all that.  It’s the cost of the vessel and outfit, Mary, that weighs so much on my spirits.  Well, Gar’ner’s first business is with them islands, which are at an awful distance for one to trust his property; but, ‘nothing ventured, nothing got,’ they say.  By my calculations, the schooner has had to go a good five hundred miles among the ice, to get to the spot; not such ice as a body falls in with, in going and coming between England and Ameriky, as we read of in the papers, but ice that covers the sea as we sometimes see it piled up in Gar’ner’s Bay, only a hundred times higher, and deeper, and broader, and colder!  It’s desperate cold ice, the sealers all tell me, that of the antarctic seas.  Some on ’em think it’s colder down south than it is the other way, up towards Greenland and Iceland itself.  It’s extr’or’nary, Mary, that the weather should grow cold as a body journeys south; but so it is, by all accounts.  I never could understand it, and it isn’t so in Ameriky, I’m sartain.  I suppose it must come of their turning the months round, and having their winter in the midst of the dog-days.  I never could understand it, though Gar’ner has tried, more than once, to reason me into it.  I believe, but I don’t understand.”

“It is all told in my geography here,” answered Mary, mechanically taking down the book, for her thoughts were far away in those icy seas that her uncle had been so graphically describing.  “I dare say we can find it all explained in the elementary parts of this book.”

“They do make their geographies useful, now-a-days,” said the deacon, with rather more animation than he had shown before, that morning.  “They’ve got ’em to be, now, almost as useful as almanacs.  Read what it says about the seasons, child.”