THE WORLD OF ICE. 13.

all his life at sea, and had become so thoroughly
accustomed to walking on an unstable foundation
that he felt quite uncomfortable on solid ground, and
never remained more than a few months at a time
on shore. He was a man of good education and
gentlemanly manners, and had worked his way up in
the merchant service step by step until he obtained
the command of a West India trader.

A few years previous to the period in which our
tale opens, an event occurred which altered the course
of Captain Ellice’s life, and for a long period plunged
him into the deepest affliction. This was the loss of
his wife at sea under peculiarly distressing eirecum-
stances.

At the age of thirty Captain Ellice had married a
pretty blue-eyed girl, who resolutely refused to become
a sailor’s bride unless she should be permitted to ac-
company her husband to sea. This was without much
difficulty agreed to, and forthwith Alice Bremner be-
came Mrs. Ellice, and went to sea. It was during her
third voyage to the West Indies that our hero Fred
was born, and it was during this and succeeding
voyages that Buzzby became “all but a wet-nurse”
to him.

Mrs. Ellice was a loving, gentle, seriously-minded
woman. She devoted herself heart and soul to the
training of her boy, and spent many a pleasant hour
in that little, unsteady cabin in endeavouring to instil
into his infant mind the blessed truths of Christianity,
and in making the name of Jesus familiar to his ear,