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I rose, and as well as I could, with my cramp- the Albatross had pierced farther to the west ed and stiffened limbs, I moved to go back for it. than her sailing-master knew, and hind host her reckoning with a disordered compass-needle under new stars—or whether I had really been the sport of the demoniac heings of the ice, tossed hy them from zone to zone in a dozen hours. The whalers, real creatures enough, had discovered me on a block of ice, they said; nor could I, in their opinion, have been many days undergoing my dreadful experience, for there was still food in my wallet when they opened it. They would never believe a word of my stQry, and so far from regarding me as one who had proved the Northwest Passage in my own person, they considercd me a mere idle maniac, as uncomfortable a thing to have on shipboard as a ghost or a dead body, wrecked and unable to account for myself, and gladly transferred me to a homeward-bound Russian man-of-war, whose officers afforded me more polite but quite as decided skepticism. I have never to this day found any one who believed my story when I told it—so you can take it for what it is worth. Even my Uncle Paul flouted it, and absolutely refused to surrender the sum on whose expectation I had taken ship; while my old ancestor, who hung peeling over the ball fire, dropped from his frame in disgust at the idea of one of his hard-cash descendants turning romancer. But all I know is that the Albatross never sailed into port again, and that if I open my knife to-day and lay it on the tahle it will wheel about till the tip of its hlade points full at the North Star.

I have never found any one to believe me, did I say? Yes, there is one—Eleanor never douhted a word of my narration, never asked me if cold and suffering had not shaken my reason. But then, after the first recital, she has never heen willing to hear another word about it, and if I ever allude to my lost treas- ure or the possibility of instituting search for it, she asks me if I need more lessons to be con- tent with the treasure that I have, and gathers up her work and gently leaves the room. So that, now I speak of it so seldom, if I had not told the thing to you it might come to pass that I should forget altogether the existence of my mass of moonstone. My mass of moonshine, old Paul calls it. I let him have his say; he can not have that nor any thing else much longer; hut when all is done I recall Galileo and I mutter to myself, “Per si muove—it was a mass of moonstone! With these eyes I saw it, with these hands I touched it, with this heart I longed for it, with this will I mean to have it yet!”