gates, no wall, and no angel with flaming sword to warn and to expel. Here in this happiness the heart cries out its own despair, speaks its own doom and banishment.

How unobserved and silently is the deep measure of the soul's endurance filled! It mounts the rim, trembles a moment there, then, like a torrent, flows the vast relief of action. This hour you are bound by the whole habit of your life and thought; the next by unerring impulse of the soul you 're free. How strong and swift is pride to clear itself, from misery or joy, from crowds, from ease, from failure, from success, from the recurrent brimful, the too much! Forever shall man seek the solitudes, and the most utter desolation of the wilderness to achieve through hardship the rebirth of his pride.

Within an hour of the thought I had secured a clerk's berth on a freighter sailing for the farthest spot on the wild far southern end of South America, of all lands that one hears or reads of the most desolate and terrible. Because I Because I love the cold and desolation and the wilderness? It's hard to say.

There is the glamour of adventure, shipwreck, death about that land; there are a hundred tales of monthlong battles with the wind and sea to round the Horn, with mountain waves a mile between their crests gleaming and thundering eternally on granite shores. That region is the sailors' graveyard, and the souls of the and the souls of the drowned, as albatrosses, haunt its waters.

And modern charts bear warnings to wrecked mariners against the savage natives of the coast. The traveler recounts their treachery, and confirms Darwin's reports of the peculiarly

hideous cannibalism that was their practice. And there are other terrors. Criminal fugitives from the prisons of Chile and the Argentine, fled to the wilderness, where they have mingled with the savages, have been the theme of stories of brigandage and pirate adventure as desperate as were ever told of the bucaneers of the Spanish main. Shipwreck and murder are the warp and woof of the tradition of that land. Magellan, Tierra del Fuego, and Cape Horn-these are living names that stir the spirit.

We 've sailed. We clear the Hook, the land drops down, the hard horizon of the sea encircles us. My life 's a memory, and the future breaks against our prow and shimmers, and is foam, and trails behind us in the steamer's wake. Hours and days and seven weeks glide by. One day I brought my charts and spread them out and talked of what I hoped to do; I hardly knew. Leaning across the table, listened a young Norwegian, the third mate. God had formed his features without malice, given him a mass of thick black hair low on his forehead, narrow blue eyes through which his soul showed mean or passionate or kind, a nose and mouth and teeth. God had made him fair enough; then the great war tore a seam across his nose and cheek, and in another war in Equador some rebel drove a crowbar hard against his lips and made his mouth a horror. Still, I have seen that mutilated face transformed with tenderness.

How much I must unthinkingly have understood this man, for when quite suddenly he said, "I want to leave the ship and go with you," I answered, "Good; you shall." And from that hour it was two of us.

With heads together, we pored over charts, embarking our dreams upon the wildest voyages. Gamblers we were, Gamblers we were, two poker-players, staking not wealth, -we had n't any, but our recklessness, pile upon pile, against each other's daring. "Stop!" I cried at last. "I'd willingly start with you and walk the Andes from the strait to Panama, or row with you in a dory around the world; but there's no sense in it and no use in boring ourselves. But we 'll do this: we 'll fit out a life-boat and sail around the Horn. We can get wrecked or drowned or eaten, or nearly. We'll call that settled."

83

Steaming for seven weeks from north to south, you pass through many climes and seasons. Spring in the north, then summer at the line, the hot and cloudless summer of the tropics. Then gradually, scarcely to be felt, the days and nights grow colder, for you are penetrating the midwinter of the southern hemisphere. It was night in mid-July when we entered the Strait of Magellan, and the low shore was scarcely to be seen. We made the We made the narrows with the turning tide, swept through, and woke at the clatter of the winch. It was morning, a blue one and a clear one, with a howling wind; we lay at anchor in the open road of Punta Arenas.

You wonder, when you see that harbor first-wonder what miracle of time has carried you back over fifty years to open your eyes upon past glories of the sea. You look, and doubt your senses; there they are, the ships, the barks. What world is this, what port? And then your staring eyes discern them shorn and stripped, with lowered yards, dismasted-hulks.

Beyond them is the city, crowded close, a port of commerce. Warehouses, a foundry, shipyards, blocks of office buildings, churches, streets of one-story homes and little shops, there at a mile away one eye full on the wide, desolate, fire-scarred plain of the continent.

Gasping to breathe, we stand there in the gale, my mate and I, and strain to see. Blue golden day, wild day, exuberant, young. Swiftly and deeply the thought of everything has touched us here on the threshold. Adventurers, alone in a new land, conquerors without a sword, voyagers without a ship, vast needs and little cash and friendless. With one impulse we turn and see through eyes that the wind has brought to tears the wild exulting of each other's hearts.

By noon the gale had moderated, and with the captain I went on shore. Burdened with anxieties and the embarrassment of appearing among these strangers in my rôle of mad adventurer, I little knew what an immediate dawn of luck was imminent. The introduction of that kingly captain conferred a title of nobility. At once every man of authority in the port became my friend; and that friendship proved itself materially as substantial as, over whisky and dice in many a midnight bout, it was humanly heartening and warm. These were true men, with more loyalty than principle, and strong wills to perform what their lips promised. While I talked with the maritime manager, he subjected me to close, but not unfriendly, scrutiny. At last he said magnificently, "If there is anything at any time that you want, come to me and ask for it.” There proved to be very little that at some time I did n't want, but nothing