"But the Dean was a right plucky little fellow, I can tell you; and so full of hope and ambition was he, that nothing could keep him down very long; and nothing, I believe, could ever make him despond for a single minute but thinking of his mother, sick and far away, without friends or money, lying on a narrow bed, all through the weary, dreary days and nights, in the dreary ward of a crowded hospital. Poor Dean! he had something to make him cry, and something always to make him sad, if he had a mind to be; but what had I in comparison?--I who had gone away from home with no good motive like the Dean's.
"After the recital of this story of the Dean's, we were both very sad, until the Dean suddenly roused himself, and said, 'Let's go and look at our traps, Hardy'; and so we sallied out into the moonlight, and waded through the snow, to see if there were any foxes for us. To get outside our hut was not so easy a matter now as it was when we first built it; for, in order to keep the cold winds away, we had made a long, low, narrow passage, with a crook in it, through which we crawled on our hands and knees, before we reached the door.
"We walked all the way around the island, and visited all our traps, of which we had seventeen, but only two of them had foxes in them; the others were either filled with snow, or were completely covered over with it, for the wind had been blowing very hard the day before.
"As we got farther and farther into the winter, we met with some very strange adventures,--altogether different from anything I have told you of before; but you see the sun will soon be going down behind the trees, and we are a good long way from the 'Mariner's Rest,' so 'up anchor' 's the word now, my dears, and 'under way' again."
The merry little yacht was not long in carrying the merry little party over to the Captain's favorite anchorage; and then they were all soon ashore, and after many merry and many pleasant speeches, our little friends parted from the ancient mariner once more, leaving him standing in the shadow of the great tall trees, with a string of fish in one hand; while Fred and William, with Main Brace to help them, and with merry Alice running on ahead, each carried off a string for their next day's breakfast,--a trophy to be proud of, as they thought.