How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!

Yet a second step istaken towards my enterprise. I have hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors; thosewhom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend and are certainly possessedof dauntless courage.But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object ofwhich I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with theenthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment,no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.

I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; butthat is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.

I desire the company of a man who couldsympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.

You may deem me romantic, my dear sister,but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.

I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of acultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend myplans.

How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!

I am too ardent in executionand too impatient of difficulties.

But it is a still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the firstfourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common and read nothing but our Uncle Thomas' books ofvoyages.

At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own country; but it wasonly when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its most important benefits from such aconviction that I perceived the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that ofmy native country.

Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys offifteen.

It is true that I have thought more and that my daydreams are more extended andmagnificent, but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would havesense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulatemy mind.Well, these are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the wide ocean, nor evenhere in Archangel, among merchants and seamen.

Yet some feelings, unallied to the dross of humannature, beat even in these rugged bosoms.

My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of wonderfulcourage and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory, or rather, to word my phrase morecharacteristically, of advancement in his profession.

He is an Englishman, and in the midst ofnational and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the noblestendowments of humanity.

I first became acquainted with him on board a whale vessel; finding thathe was unemployed in this city, I easily engaged him to assist in my enterprise.