106 



RELICS OF POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. 



ice-island he now trod on resembled the ribs and deck of a stately 

 ship. A few columns of fantastic ice stood at unequal distances, 

 in postures strangely resembling statues of shrouded men. Sturm 

 trembled as he looked, and his bewildered imagination gave to 

 one of them the features and form of him he had murdered. He 

 sank on his knees, and remembering the awful office assigned by 

 superstition to the Ship of Death, conceived himself selected to 

 endure the weight of retributive justice. Fear, exhaustion, and 

 the fumes of spirit too powerful for his weakened frame, produced 

 the torpor which most resembles death, and oftenest precedes it in 

 the midst of ice. He slept till awakened by a torch and the 

 touch of an old man wrapped in a fur cloak, with a gigantic New- 

 foundland dog by his side. *^ 

 " Are there not two of you here said the old man, raising 

 his lighted pine-branch, and looking round. Sturm replied by 

 feebly raising the sail-cloth, and pointing to the boy, whose 

 warmth, as he lay nestled in his breast, had probably preserved 

 his life. " That is well," rejoined the stranger — " two nights ago, 

 I dreamed that five living creatures were in this Ship of the Dead 

 — next night, I saw but four ; and this hour, my sleep shewed me 

 only two. Therefore I came, for to-morrow would have been too 

 late." The Saxon's blood ran still colder, while this aged seer 

 and his sons placed him in a cot made of bear-skins, and carried 

 him as in a hammock towards a recess, where, stiffened in death, 

 on each side of a burning fir-trunk, he saw two of his comrades in 

 postures such as our poet has imagined for two enemies expiring 

 together in the darkness of the last day. The body of a third 

 lay at some distance, mangled as it seemed by violence. The 

 prophet's family were inhabitants of a lonely creek on the coast 

 of Labrador, not far from the isle of death ; and Sturm suffered 

 them to convey him, with the helpless child, to their little pinnace 

 and hospitable hut. A few days spent under their bountiful and 

 simple care, with the aid of such medicaments as superstition 

 sanctifies, gave strength and hope to the solitary sailor. Yet he 

 became silent and melancholy, repHed in few words to their ques- 

 tions respecting his shipwreck, and shunned all proposals to do- 

 mesticate or ally himself with them. He worked diligently as a 

 carpenter, and promised his aid in constructing a better boat. 

 They furnished him with materials ; and after a year laboriously 

 spent, he completed a six-oared cutter, and witnessed the jubilee 



