THE INSECT. 
307 
ol the tissue, it is not a damp application. The only 
trouble is that, on taking the bedding below, the con- 
densation covers it with dew-drops. With drying-lines 
on the lower decks, the resort would be excellent. 
" The setting sun, now fast approaching the home 
quarter of setting suns, the west, gave us again the 
spectral land about Cape Adair, eighty miles off. 
" Sirius is beautifully resplendent on the meridian. 
What a fine exhibition it is ! As it rises from the 
banked horizon, it gives us nightly freaks of terrestrial 
refraction. Its colors are blue, crimson, and white ; its 
shapes oval, hour-glass, rhomboid, and square. Some- 
times it is extinguished ; sometimes flashing into sud- 
den life : it looks very like a revolving light. 
" To-day, in putting my hand inside my reindeer 
hood, I felt a something move. The something had 
a crepitating, insectine wriggle. Now, at home and 
every where else, without being a nervous man as to 
insects — for I have eaten locusts in Sennaar and bats 
in Dahomey — rather dislike the crawl of centipede 
or slime of snail. Here, with an emotion hard to de- 
scribe, surprise, pleasure, and a don't-know-why won- 
derment, I caught my bug gently between thumb and 
finger. 
"An air insect would be, in this dreary waste of 
cold, an impossibility greater than the diamond in the 
snow-drift. Save a seal and a fox, nothing sharing 
our principle of vitality has greeted us for months. 
The teeming myriads of life which characterized the 
Arctic summer have gone. The anatidse are clamor- 
ing in the great bays and water-courses of the middle 
south. The gulls have sought the regions of open 
water. The colymbi and Auks are lining the north- 
ern coasts of my own dear home. The croaking raven, 
