In the Great White Land by Gordon Stables

There was much talk of home to-night, between Curtis and Ingomar. The former told his friend all about his English roof-tree, and cheerfully of his doings while living there as a boy, all his sports, and fun, and play, and his practical jokes on the old gardener. About the horses his father rode to the hounds, and about the hounds themselves. There had only been two in the family, two children, I mean, and sister had a pony as well as he, and, oh! the glorious scampers they had had over his father's wide and beautiful estate, which usually ended, he said, in getting into grief or trouble.

But father was dead, and mother and sister too, and although the land was now his, somehow he did not care to go back and live there. It would be so sad and lonesome. It was grief that had caused him to work so hard, and to take to the study of the sciences, even when but a small cadet on board the old _Britannia_.