Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1898-02-20

cabin. had never been aboard of the Meteor and could not answer her off
 hand, but later on I confirmed every statement she made except the wreck of the ship. It was no dream, sirs, but
 q yision-a second sight Her spirit
 must have sought and found that ship ! through storm and darkness, to be
 able to describe things as she did.
 Well, what the lady wanted is the
 next thing of interest, and perhaps you
 will not be surprised when 1 say that she had fully made up her mind to fit
 out ship and send it cruising down
 towards the south pole in search of her
 lover. Nothing l could say would dis suade her from her enterprise, and that very afternoon she commissioned Messrs. Graves X Hargreaves to buy and fit out a craft. As 1 stood well with the firm 1 was offered the berth of chief mate and sent out to look for suitable
 bottom. The orders were to spare no expense, and in the end 1 bought new bark of 400 tons burthen and sent her NO biiS nili ell u tO 5C StACllS ttiGlCus
 am not going to detail the run. We had learned that for a period of IS days before the Meteor" was supposed to have been lost, there was an unbroken gale from the northwest. This would have been in her teeth and driven her down to the south and southeast. Getting our latitude as nearly as we could we bore away to the south. It was now summer time, and though we got an occasional gale, there was nothing to dread. For 12 days and nights, making very ordi- nary runs, we held our way down into the region of silence and fear, and them we sighted our first ice. It Nsas being driven northward by the summer winds, and at daylight one morning we found the whole ocean tothe south covered. We ran 70 miles to the east to turn this field of ice, and then to the southwest for three days more before we got among the pack ice and icebergs. One night the wind failed Us and we drifted into a gap in a foe and were frozen in. If the silence and darkness of the Arctic sea are as awesome and terrifying as men tell us it is no worse than that almost unknown sea which washes the base of the other pole, the silence of which is so awful and the darkness so dense that men dare not open their lips to speak the name of God. One week We lay embedded in the foe, making not the slightest drift in any direction, and seeing neither gull nor whale nor shark nor any living thing except what belonged to us. The days were full of haze and leg and hol- low sounds and strange whfspers-the nights were appalling. God, how grue- some it wasi If a gale had not sprung up and let us loose, some of our men would have gone crazy in a day or two more. For eight days we battled with ice-gigantic bergs, pack ice, foes and patches-and there was not an hour in all that time when we felt safe. On the ninth day the wind fell 10 a gentle breeze, the sea went down, and at noon we were within mile of the biggest berg of them all. It was three bergs frozen together, or looked that way, and from the water tc. the highest point must have been distance of 800 feet. It was a solid mass d mile square, and there were peaks and raYines and plateaus, as you would find on noun tain. As we sailed slowly along, new [ sight presented itself every moment, and the grandeur and solidity of the great berg awed us until the men spoke in whispers to each other.
 We had traversed two-thirds eff the length of the big berg when it began to turn on its axis, as it were. 1 sup pose some current far down was at work at the gigantic base. It reyolved from east to west, turning slowly and maiestically, and as we watched it with bated breath the captain suddenly raised his glass to his eye and sung cut:
 Good God. Mir. Clarke, but look tbere -on that shelf about 50 feet up!'
 took the glass and at once made out human figures-men seated with their faces towards us. A moment later we had run up a flag, brought the bark to the wind and were firing muslsets. was making the boat ready when the pale-faced captain advanced and whispered:
 "They are dead men, MT. Clarke, but get the bodies if you can! They must be the men from the Meteor.''
 Four sailors pulled me as near the berg as I dared go, and with the glass to my eyes brought the bodies with in three feet of me. There were three seaman and the passenger Wellby. They sat with folded arms and their open eyes on the sea, and the cold had preserved them until ii was hard to be- lieye them dead. Pulling along a few hundred feet found landing place, and accompanied by one of the men, clambered over the ice toward the bodies. We reached a spot directly be- heath them, but there was a perpenr dicular cliff nearly 100 feet high be- tween us and the shelf There had been no cliff when they first set foot on the shelf. They reached the spot when the ship struck and bounded back to go down, and there they had perished from hunger and exposure. For three years