He saw an expanse of wild waters. The waters were grey and turbid from action of the winds. Clouds hung low over the sea in thick folds, through which came a dim yellow light. It was a November afternoon. A heavy gale blew from the north-east. In the plain of the German Ocean exposed to view nothing was visible but cloud and billow. This north-east piercing wind had come across the frozen plains and seas and mountains and forests and fjords of Norway. His eyes explored the north-eastern plain of water. He could see nothing but sea and vapour. Not an island, not a rock, not a ship was in sight. This vision had become familiar to him. He knew its history, its sequence, its goal. For years it had haunted him. He had now no control over it. Once he had read something, which had suggested it. Time after time he indulged his imagination in the spectacle of events following that open space of turbid sea in the Northern Ocean, and now he had no power to dismiss it from his imagination if he had had the will. To-night some unknown fear lurked in his consciousness. He could not tell what this fear was. It was strange, too, this vision now in opening before him had the aspect of a threat. Of old it had boded no evil. It had been nothing but an imaginative way of putting a guess, a theory. To-night, when he had turned his eyes first on that ugly space of wind-tossed waters, his spirits had suddenly sunk, and he had shivered, as if under portentous influence. Around him, beneath him, lay London, hushed in sleep. In no other part of the world was peaceful man so secure as in London. He had but to ring a bell, break a pane of glass, and shout, to summon succour sufficient to overwhelm a hundred assassins. What chilled and terrified Osborne was no dread of violence from without. There was nothing outside this room of which he stood in fear. And yet he trembled and felt cold and tremulously alarmed. No spectre of a wrong done by him rose up before his eyes. All his past showed nothing which could threaten his peace. He did not know clearly what he dreaded. He had a foreboding without a form. What disturbed him so this night of his greatest worldly triumph, of his dearest earthly joy? He could not answer. Might this be a form of compensation, of reaction, to balance the ecstasy of the day? He could not tell. He only knew that vision had begun, and would now go on; and he felt that when it ended he should be face to face with trouble never dreamed of till then. He saw in the eye of the wind, where sea and sky tumbled together away in the north-east, a dark dot. It looked no bigger than a grain of sand upon a drumhead, and it danced and leaped as a grain of sand on a drumhead when the skin is struck. Although this object looked small, and was now only on the verge of the horizon, it lay at no great distance; for gales and lowering clouds and mounting waters curtain off space, and bring the horizon home. Gradually the small object increased in size as it was pressed forward in a south-westerly direction by the wind. It never grew to great size. As it approached he could see dimly it was a long large canoe, made of a tree hollowed out like those used by the Indians. It was open, undecked. It had no sail, and was blown forward by the action of the wind on the hull. As the canoe drew nearer he could discern the figure of a man standing in the stern of the boat, paddle in hand. Now he made a swift stroke of the paddle this way, now that. Anon he swept the blade two or three times in the one direction. In front of where the man stood lay something covered up with skins. Each wave that trembled and pressed past him the man surveyed quietly, calmly, deliberately, using his paddle so as to prevent the mounting water swamping his boat. When the wave had gone by, and immediate danger no longer threatened the canoe, he turned his eyes upon the bundle at his feet. His face was capable of little expression; nevertheless there was a difference between the glance he gave the menacing waves and the look he gave the bundle. In the former dwelt an expression of familiarity, mastery, superiority; in the latter, one of concern and pity. The substantial lineaments of his countenance did not alter; the only thing which changed was the spirit of his eyes. The short winter day died. The wind did not increase, but drew a little more to the eastward. Still the man stood erect. The bundle lay at his feet; and he watched the waves mount and curl round him, and steered his boat. But something of the determined air and resolute touch had left him, and his actions were less decisive and firm. As night closed in, the canoe still drifted before the northeasterly breeze. The bundle at his feet moved. He stooped hastily, and passed a handful of food under the skins; there was a low moan from under the skins. The man threw up his head, and looked desperately around him. Nearly all the light had gone now; but in the dim yellow twilight he detected something which created a profound emotion in him. He bent down and tried to pierce the thickening gloom. Then he drew in his paddle out of the water, and resting it on the bottom of the canoe, stood upon the gunwale, and, balancing himself, looked long into the south-west, the course in which the wind was carrying him. At length a gleam of hope illumined his face. With a wild shout of joy he sprang down from the gunwale, and, bending over the bundle in the bottom of the boat, cried out,-- 'Land! Land ahead!' The bundle moved a little once more, and a faint cry, half pleasure half pain, came from it. He took two more handfuls of some dark-coloured food, and thrust it under the furs. That was the last food left in the canoe. Night fell, and still that rude boat drifted on. Hour after hour this solitary figure stood up in the stern, and kept the boat from harm. About midnight the waves grew gradually less and less, and about the third hour the canoe was in comparatively smooth water. The man stooped, shook the bundle at his feet softly, and said,-- 'Courage! We are in a fjord or river. We are saved!' Although it was dark at four, he could make out land, low land at both sides of him. For hours he still kept on. Gradually the water had grown smoother, and now he was enabled to direct the course of the boat while crouching in the stern. He was almost exhausted, and kept awake with difficulty. At last, instead of the long even swells, the water grew broken and chopped, and whistled in the breeze. He noticed also the canoe moved more slowly, and that there was more difficulty in steering her. The man stood up, leaned over the side of the canoe, and laid his paddle on the surface of the water. The breeze had power over the boat, but little or none over the floating paddle. He then fixed his eyes on a large object on the shore close to hand, and watched intently. The boat neither advanced nor receded, yet the influence of the wind was as great as it had been hours before. Some force was counteracting the wind. He leaned over and grasped the paddle floating alongside. It had drifted an arm's length astern. Only one inference could be drawn from these facts: the tide had turned. Only one dread was in his mind: he might be dragged out to sea again. He bent low and examined, as well as the light would allow him, the right-hand shore. It was irregular, indented with little creeks and bays. Abreast of him was the highest point of land in view. He could see the other shore and about half-a-mile of the shore he lay under. Seizing the paddle in both hands, he impelled the canoe slowly and cautiously towards the high land on the starboard beam. Gradually as he approached, the ground rose out of the water, and when he had got in shore he could dimly make out a round acclivity sloping gradually upwards five or six canoes' lengths high. He thrust the paddle down in the water as far as it would go. It stuck, and required force to bring it up again. When he got it up he felt the blade. That was all right now--mud. With a few dexterous strokes of his paddle he shot the canoe forward, steered her behind a little promontory, and then drove her head ashore. He walked forward, and with his paddle felt the bottom of the river. Mud, and a hand's breadth of water. He went aft, and thrust down his paddle. Mud and an arm's depth of water. Good! The water would fall away and leave the canoe high and dry. It would be daylight soon. When the sun arose he should look round and see this place. He was tired, worn out. He would lie down and sleep awhile. He bent over the bundle, and said,-- 'All is well. We have reached land! Courage! We shall go ashore in the morning. It is near day. I will lie down and sleep till dawn.' A low moan was the only reply. The man threw himself on the bottom of the canoe and drew skins over him. The sun had risen above the horizon when he awoke. Dull clouds hung overhead. The sun was hidden. Gradually the river became illumined. The man sat up and looked around him. In front lay a vast stretch of marshes, with here and there a low hummock rising a few feet above the yellow water. To the west of the land, on which the canoe had taken the ground, appeared an opening. To the east all was morass and dreary swamp and water. Above him rose the gentle hill, clad from the margin of the river to the summit with lofty leafless trees, beneath which brambles and underwood lay bare and ragged, and under all a thin carpet of moss-like grass. The water had now fallen away from the boat, and she lay high and dry upon a bank of soft dark mud. The man felt this mud with his paddle, ascertained it was firm enough to support his weight, stepped out on it, and ascended the slope. When he reached the summit he looked round and found himself on a small island, standing in a swampy plain, with a broad river, the one he had come up the night before, on the southern shore, and a small stream on the western side. He could not see how far the island extended to the east; it could be no great distance, for, above the farthest land, eastward, gleamed water. Upon this island, and upon this only of all in view, grew forest trees. The place was a desert, a waste; no sign of man appeared. By hard Fate this unlucky man had been blown away from his home, from his fellows, and his peers. Day had succeeded day, and he had seen nothing but water and sky, sky and water. Now he saw land, but a strange unknown land; a land never trodden by man before--a land he had never heard of, and he came of a great seafaring race. He had not been overwhelmed by the sea; but, except that fate, this was the worst that could befall him. He was not dead, but he stood in a strange land, a land from which he could never find his way back over unexplored seas, fathomless darkness of night, tumult of waves. But the best must be made of things as they were. Looking at sky and river and shore would not restore him to the land of his birth. The best thing to do was to try what he could make of the place which had come in his way and saved him from a watery grave. He glanced around him to see what facilities the place afforded. The first thing which caught his eyes was a large white stone among the trees at the top of the hill. Three trees stood near this stone. A hut might be constructed with the stone for one side, and trees for corners of the opposing side. It was desirable he should live on the highest point of the island. There was no trace of man here. But people might come up that river upon either design or compulsion, and it was desirable he should be in a position commanding all approaches. Yes, he would build a hut there to shelter them; when that was done, he should explore this strange country at leisure. Now he should go and fetch them. He returned to the boat, and, bending over the bundle, spoke, and raised the skins. The sun had not come out, but the light shone full and strong. In the light of that November day the man lifted and carried ashore his wife and new-born son, and conveyed them up to the place he had selected as their future home. This man, this woman, and this child, on the top of that low hill that November day, who had been blown off the coast of Denmark, were the first human beings that had set foot on this soil, this country. Since that day alterations have taken place in that landscape. Since then great alterations have taken place on that hill. Among many changes, one of the most remarkable is that layer after layer of matter has accumulated on the hill, and it now rises to twice its former height. The stone, against which that half-naked savage reared his rude wattle hut, was not destroyed or carried away. It still occupies the same position as then. It is now covered with layers of deposit. It is on the same level as the day he landed; It stands in the same latitude and longitude. In the same latitude and longitude to-day, three hundred and ninety feet above that stone, blazes in the sun the gilded Cross of the Christian Cathedral of St Paul's! George Osborne's vision ended. He rose, stood by the window, looked out on London of to-day.