He thought when I got home I could interest the
scientific men in his discovery: but they're all taken up with
their own notions; some didn't even take pains to answer the
letters I wrote. You observe that I said this crippled man Gaffett
had been shipped on a voyage of discovery. I now tell you that the
ship was lost on its return, and only Gaffett and two officers were
saved off the Greenland coast, and he had knowledge later that
those men never got back to England; the brig they shipped on was
run down in the night. So no other living soul had the facts, and
he gave them to me. There is a strange sort of a country 'way up
north beyond the ice, and strange folks living in it. Gaffett
believed it was the next world to this."
"What do you mean, Captain Littlepage?" I exclaimed. The old
man was bending forward and whispering; he looked over his shoulder
before he spoke the last sentence.
"To hear old Gaffett tell about it was something awful," he
said, going on with his story quite steadily after the moment of
excitement had passed.
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