The inevitable Saturday came, that Saturday which has become a day of farewells, and the little party of four started on the first stage of their pilgrimage to the Land of Gold.

At Waterloo station, in the tumult of many partings, a thrill of pain vibrating through the agitated crowd, Arden found Mrs. Bellingham, calm in the midst of distracted passengers and hurrying porters.

Her farewell was full of affection, and not without hope. "My poor friend, be of good courage," she said, "and be constant even to an unhappy love. Who knows what may be waiting for you in the days to come? I shall always believe in you."

And then, as the clamorous bell rang, and the last of the travellers were taking their seats, she gave him a packet addressed in the hand he knew so well.

"Rachel's good-bye," she said. "A letter?" he asked eagerly.

"No; I don't think there is a letter, only a word of farewell, with the book she loves."

They clasped hands as the train moved slowly westward, past a cloud of waving hands and agitated faces.

He did not open the little parcel till late in the afternoon, when he was alone in his cabin, and the wooded shores of the Solent were fading into grey fog.

The book was the New Testament, bound in pale green silk, almost covered by a large white lily, a piece of delicate embroidery which Arden had seen in Rachel's hands as she sat beside him at some of their East End entertainments. It touched him that she had given him her own worksomething of herself. She had written her farewell on the flyleaf.

'Good-bye, dear Friend. If this book cannot be to you what it is to me, I hope you will cherish it as the story of a Beautiful Life. I shall think of you and pray for you; and my prayer will be that you may find God in the wilderness."

The great ship moved over the waters like a floating town, so full of human life, of voices and movement, and the different classes of society. The Jamfords and Stormont occupied a luxurious seclusion in the finest state-rooms; Dartnell was in the steerage; and Arden and the Edinburgh

doctor were among the second-class passengers, Arden having taken advantage of Alick Mackenzie's economical considerations as an excuse for keeping clear of the Chicago family, whose exuberant enjoyment of the passing hour would have been more than he could bear. No matter that the cabin he shared with Mackenzie was exiguous, and had only a borrowed light; he was at least out of reach of gay company, safe from invitations to music or parlour games in the ladies' saloon. He could lie in his berth with his face to the wall, and fancy himself lying in his grave. He could not seem to have more utterly done with life, he thought, if the narrow space had been underground.

He was a good sailor, and his mental pain was neither intensified nor deadened by physical suffering. After two days spent in dumb despair, which Mackenzie took for suppressed sea-sickness, and was anxious to alleviate, he opened his cabin-trunk and selected two or three volumes from his little library of choice books; and the old, old friends talked to him with their kindly voices: Wordsworth and Coleridge, in whose life man's love for woman played so small a part; Lamb, for whom no star shone, and whose every personal utterance breathes of meek renunciation; Goldsmith, one of Nature's unfortunates, an exquisite light in an unbeautiful lamp. These all had been happy, with that temperate pleasure in simple things, and that tender appreciation of natural beauty, which elect souls enjoy; an equable state of mind that knows not the burning sun or the black storm-clouds of passion. Their voices soothed him in his dejection, and subtle shades of thought and feeling appealed to him as they had never done before.

His first three nights at sea had been sleepless, but on the fourth night he slept long and profoundly, and his dreams were many and vivid. Rachel was his companion through the labyrinth-in many and strange places-amongst unknown multitudes, or amongst people whom they seemed to have known always. They were together, engaged in the work they had so lately been doing, but with the dreamelement of strangeness and impossibility in everything. Yet the dreams had been full of happiness-bliss too exquisite for expression-and her face, her voice, the touch of her hand, had been so real that he had told himself "this is not

a dream;" and waking in the wintry dawn it had been some moments before he realized that he had been living among shadows, that he was more than a thousand miles from the place that held Rachel.

On the fifth night his dreams were troubled, though Rachel was in them still. They were parting; the scene in Mrs. Bellingham's library was acted over again, under strange conditions. He held her in his arms, as he had held her in those passionate moments, and the face that looked up at him was the face he had seen then, the same pale lips, the same tearful eyes; but her words were not the same.

She spoke like a prophetess; the deep note of warning thrilled him.

"You are living without God in the world," she said; "but who is to defend you from the power of the devil? You have chosen between man's two masters, Christ and Satan. You have chosen the Lord of Hell instead of the Lord of Heaven; and your existence on earth and after earth will be miserable. These tears are not of love, but of pity-pity for your dreadful fate!"

Her speech was ringing in his ears when he awoke, and her speech was like the cry of pain. The dream, and the strange tones of the dream-voice, haunted him all day, as he sat alone, in a sheltered corner of the deck, watching the racing waves and the gradual changes of a wintry sky. He could interest himself in nothing, neither the moving figures on the deck nor the progress of the ship, neither his books nor the conversation of Alick Mackenzie, who wanted to talk to him, but was repelled by his abstracted manner, which he could no longer attribute to sea-sickness.

The sixth night brought fainter dreams, pale shadows moving through Cimmerian darkness, and Rachel's form was not among those shadows. His sleep was broken and agitated, and in his waking intervals the old trouble clouded

his mind.

"I say, old chap, I'm afraid you've had a touch of nightmare," said Mackenzie, in his strong young voice, when the steward brought them their morning tea. "You'd better let me give you a bromide draught before you turn in to-night."

"I'd better let you give me a dose of prussic acid, if I want to dream no more hellish dreams!"

"No, no, my dear fellow, don't talk rot! Your nerves are out of order-or perhaps it's your digestion. You don't eat enough for a sparrow, and the only way to do a sea-voyage well is to feed like an alderman. But I'll give you a harmless mixture that will settle your nightmare dreams, if you'll come to your meals regularly, and take a little exercise on deck, instead of moping in a dark corner."

"Do you remember that story in Scott's "Demonology "the story of the man who was haunted, first by a black cat, next by a skeleton, then by a gentleman usher? He was a man of sense, and he knew the things were not there-not the actual things; but the spectral appearances were enough to take all the pleasure out of life."

"Have you been seeing things?"

"No, I have seen nothing; but the story of those three spectral forms came into my mind as I lay awake this morning."

"You had been dreaming ugly dreams?"

"Yes."

"You won't be troubled with those when we are tramping in Alaska."

XIII.

THERE could hardly be a more startling change of scene than from the west and the east of London to Juneau in Alaska, the rising city, at the gateway of the gold country, the headquarters of several steamboat lines, and the busy mart where the miners buy their outfit, a picturesque settlement at the foot of the snow-mountains, whence the avalanches come tearing down day after day. Here Archer Stormont and his companions bought revolvers, guns, and ammunition, boat-building tools, provisions, and miners' clothes, and shipped themselves and their luggage on the little steamboat, Adventure, bound for the Indian village of Dyea, the extreme northern limit of navigation. Here, after two nights and one day, the steamer dropped anchor a mile from the shore, and a gigantic canoe, manned by painted Indians, shipped the four men and their cargo, and carried them ashore, in the teeth of a gale.

A curious change from Jermyn Street lodgings and a club in Pall Mall, to lie under canvas near an Indian village, in a district where there was only one white inhabitant among a goodly tribe of redskins, a race whose picturesqueness and personal dignity had the drawback of a quarrelsome temper, an insatiable greed of gain, and an unappeasable craving for strong drink, the fire-water which exalted them to madness, and provoked them to murder, or reduced them to drivelling imbecility, according to quantity or temperament.

This was but the first stage in the pilgrimage. The journey by mountain and lake began at this point. Travellers less adventurous might have chosen a slower and easier route by taking the steamer from San Francisco to St. Michael, and thence by a stern-wheel river-boat up