368 MARVELS OF THE NORTH 



Can we at best get beyond the outward show of things? What would it 

 profit even if we could say that it is an electric discharge or currents of 

 electricity through the upper regions of the air, and were able to describe in 

 minutest detail how it all came to be? It would be mere words. We know 

 no more what an electric current really is than what the aurora borealis is. 

 Happy is the child. . . . We, with all our views and theories, are not in 

 the last analysis a hair's-breadth nearer the truth than it. 



ROAR OF PACKING ICE. 



"Tuesday, November 13th. Thermometer — 38 degrees C. ( — 36.4 

 degrees Fahr.). The ice is packing in several quarters during the day, and 

 the roar is pretty loud, now that the ice has become colder. It can be heard 

 from afar — a strange roar, which would sound uncanny to any one who did 

 not know what it was, 



"A delightful snow-shoe run in the light of the full moon. Is life a 

 vale of tears? Is it such a deplorable fate to dash off like the wind, with all 

 the dogs skipping around one, over the boundless expanse of ice, through 

 a night like this, in the fresh, crackling frost, while the snow-shoes glide 

 over the smooth surface, so that you scarcely know you are touching the 

 earth, and the stars hang high in the blue vault above? This is more, in- 

 deed, than one has any right to expect of life ; it is a fairy tale from another 

 world, from a life to come. 



"And then to return home to one's cozy study-cabin, kindle the stove, 

 light the lamp, fill a pipe, stretch one's self on the sofa, and send dreams out 

 into the world with the curling clouds of smoke — is that a dire infliction? 

 Thus I catch myself sitting staring at the fire for hours together, dreaming 

 myself away — a useful way of employing the time. But at least it makes it 

 slip unnoticed by, until the dreams are swept away in an ice-blast of reality, 

 and I sit here in the midst of desolation, and nervously set to work again. 



"Wednesday, November 14th. How marvelous are those snow-shoe 

 runs through this silent nature! The ice-fields stretch all around, bathed in 

 the silver moonlight ; here and there dark cold shadows project from the 

 hummocks, whose sides faintly reflect the twilight. Far, far out a dark line 

 marks the horizon, formed by the packed-up ice, over it a shimmer of silvery 

 vapor, and above all the boundless deep-blue, starry sky, where the full moon 

 sails through the ether. But in the south is a faint glimmer of day low down 

 of a dark, glowing red hue, and higher up a clear yellow and pale-green 



