with--"Well, he was pleasant company, poor fellow," and go on digging
without a sigh? What, if it were his fate to die, as he had seen many
a stronger man, there in that lonely wilderness, and sleep for ever,
unhonoured and unknown, beneath that awful forest roof, while his
father looked for bread to others' hands?

No man was less sentimental, no man less superstitious than Thomas
Thurnall; but crushed and softened--all but terrified (as who would
not have been?)--by that day's news, he could not struggle against the
weight of loneliness which fell upon him. For the first and last time,
perhaps, in his life, he felt fear; a vague, awful dread of unseen and
inevitable possibilities. Why should not calamity fall on him, wave
after wave? Was it not falling on him already? Why should he not grow
sick to-morrow, break his leg, his neck--why not? What guarantee had
he in earth or heaven that he might not be "snuffed out silently," as
he had seen hundreds already, and die and leave no sign? And there
sprang up in him at once the intensest yearning after his father and
the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that he should never
see them. Might not his father be dead ere he could return?--if ever
he did return. That twelve thousand miles of sea looked to him a gulf
impassable. Oh, that he were safe at home! that he could start that
moment! And for one minute a helplessness, as of a lost child, came
over him.

Perhaps it had been well for him had he given that feeling vent,
and, confessing himself a lost child, cried out of the darkness to a
Father; but the next minute he had dashed it proudly away.

"Pretty baby I am, to get frightened, at my time of life, because
I find myself in a dark wood--and the sun shining all the while as