Struggling to the southward after abandoning their ships, they fell one by one, and their lives ebbed away on the cruel ice.

"They fell down and died as they walked," said an old Esquimau woman to Lieutenant McClintock, of the British navy, who sought for tidings of them, and, indeed, her report found sorrowful verification in the skeletons discovered years afterward, lying face downward in the snow.

To the last man they died.

Think of the state of that last man--alone in the frozen wilderness! An eloquent writer, the correspondent McGahan, himself no stranger to Arctic pains and perils, has imagined that pitiful picture thus: "One sees this man after the death of his last remaining companion, all alone in that terrible world, gazing round him in mute despair, the sole, living thing in that dark frozen universe.

The sky is somber, the earth whitened with a glittering whiteness that chills the heart.