Page:Adrift on an Ice-Pan (1909).djvu/88

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ADRIFT ON AN ICE-PAN

ning through my head all the time, quite unbidden, were the words of the old hymn:—


My God, my Father, while I stray
Far from my home on life’s dark way,
Oh, teach me from my heart to say,
Thy will be done!”


It is a hymn we hardly ever sing out here, and it was an unconscious memory of my boyhood days.

It was a perfect morning,—a cobalt sky, an ultramarine sea, a golden sun, an almost wasteful extravagance of crimson over hills of purest snow, which caught a reflected glow from rock and crag. Between me and the hills lay miles of rough ice and long veins of thin black slob that had formed during the night. For the foreground there was my poor, gruesome pan, bobbing up and down on

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