THE ROMANCE OF NATURAL 

 HISTORY. 



CHAPTER I. 



Times and Seasons. 



"To everything there is a season;" and, in its 

 season, everything is comely. Winter is not with- 

 out its charm, the charm of a grand and desolate 

 majesty. The Arctic voyagers have seen King 

 Winter on his throne, and a full royal despot he 

 is. When the mercury is solid in the bulb, to look 

 abroad on the boundless waste of snow, all silent 

 and motionless, in the very midst of the six- 

 months' night, must be something awful. And 

 yet there is a glory and a beauty visible in per- 

 fection only then. There is the moon, of dazzling 

 brightness, circling around the horizon ; there are 

 ten thousand crystals of crisp and crackling snow 

 reflecting her beams; there are the stars flashing 

 and sparkling with unwonted sharpness; and 

 there is the glorious aurora spanning the purple 

 sky with its arch of coruscating beams, now ad- 

 vancing, now receding, like angelic watchers en- 

 gaged in mystic dance, now shooting forth spears 

 and darts of white light with rustling whisper, 

 and now unfurling a broad flag of crimsoned 

 flame, that diffuses itself over the heavens, and is 

 reflected from the unsullied snow beneath. These 

 phenomena I have seen during many years' resi- 

 dence in the grim and ice-bound Newfoundland, 

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