50 ELISHA KENT KANE. 



and various patches of clothing. But the most 

 remarkable mementos of all were three graves, side 

 by side, of that gallant band who had perished amid 

 those Arctic solitudes and had there been laid to 

 rest. These graves were simple and neat in their 

 appearance, such as British sailors generally construct 

 over the bodies of their unfortunate messmates in 

 every quarter of the globe, whether they expire in 

 the frozen zones of the North, the coral-girded isles 

 of the South, the verdant and spicy climes of the 

 East, or the gold-burdened lauds of the West. They 

 were graves which reminded the observer of some 

 quiet rural churchyard in England or in our own 

 country, where the departed sleep beneath the very 

 eaves of the humble sanctuary, surrounded by the 

 green turf, the waving grass, and the blooming rose, 

 with which the hand of affection, or the unaided 

 fruitfulness of nature, has embellished them. One 

 of the graves was especially suggestive of mournful 

 thoughts. Its inscription ran thus : " Sacred to the 

 memory of John Hartwell, A.B., of H. M. S. Ere- 

 bus, aged twenty-three years." Here was a youth 

 who had been reared amid the classic shades and 

 the ennobling influences of one of England's great 

 Universities, either a Cantab or an Oxonian ; and 

 it had been his strange and melancholy fate to ter- 

 minate his brief career in this inhospitable realm, 



