The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 26: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Wreck of the South Pole. 19 beings, spurred me on and I walked more rapidly than any previous day. Queer things had happened to me during my brief so- journ so this ice-bound continent, but a stranger event still was to happen this day, an event which, perhaps, had much to do with molding my life, perhaps the future of a ereat nation I was approaching. Indeed, I am almost in- clined to believe its effects may possibly, as I was after- ward told, be so far reaching as to include the whole globe. It is thus that at every turn in life the little things bear in their turn incalculable results. You will not have forgotten the man whom I saw fora moment that first day on the summit of the iceberg, but who disappeared so suddenly that I was feign to believe him an image of my demented brain. You may remem- ber, also, the voices which I heard speaking to me in the awful silence of glittering ice and infinite depths of sky. And the cottages, or huts, strung at regular intervals in which I was fed by mysterious hands! But the most mys- terious of all to me was the finding of the note upon the table, where, half an hour before, I knew it had not been. All these were full of mystery, but the crowning mystery and, I may add, crowning glory, came to me this last day of isolation. When I had walked for probably five hours, and the landscape was growing more and more like that of an in- habitable country, with here and there struggling trees Conmniclooolk (FO)