THE PAEADISE OP THE CHAEADRIID^. 55 



The grand battle between summer and winter only lasts a fortnight, when the final 

 march past of the beaten winter forces begins, and for seven days more the ragtag and 

 bobtail of the great Arctic army comes straggling down the river— worn and weather- 

 beaten little icebergs, dirty ice-floes that look like floating mud-banks, and scattered pack- 

 ice in the last stages of consumption. Winter is finally vanquished for the year, and the 

 fragments of his beaten army are compelled to retreat to the triumphant music of thousands 

 of song-birds, amidst the waving of green leaves and the illumination of gay flowers of 

 every hue. The transformation-scene is perfect. In a fortnight the endless waves of 

 monotonous white snow have vanished, and between the northern limit of forest-growth 

 and the shores of the Polar Basin smiles a fairy-land full of the most delightful little lakes 



Final march 

 past. 



Midsummer 

 on tlie 

 tundra. 



and tarns, where Phalaropes swim about amongst Ducks and Geese and Swans, and upon 

 whose margins Stints and Sandpipers trip over the moss and the stranded potamogetons, 

 feeding upon the larvae of mosquitoes or on the fermenting frozen fruit of last year's 

 autumn. 



It is incredible how rapidly the transformation was completed. Twelve hours 

 after the snow had melted the wood-anemone was in flower, and twenty-four hours 

 afterwards the yellow flowers of the marsh-marigold opened. In a short time the country 

 looked like an English garden run wild. On the Arctic Circle wild onions, wild rhubarb, 

 pansies, Jacob's-ladder, purple anemones, dwarf roses, and a hundred other flowers made Sudden 

 the country quite gay ; whilst on the tundras wild fruits of various kinds — crowberry, cran- of flowers".'* 

 berry, cloudberry, arctic strawberry — were blended with reindeer-moss and other lichens, 

 together with the most characteristic flowers of an Alpine flora — gentians, saxifrages, forget- 

 me-nots, pinks, monkshoods, both blue and yellow, and sheets of the Silene acaulis with 



