A WINTRY WILDERNESS. 237 
houses, with their single windows, thin walls, 
and wood fires. They are wrong. There is a 
degree of heat attainable in a small room, armed 
with an air-tight stove, which burns birch sticks 
or slabs almost as fast as they can be fed to it, 
that is able to hold its own against the equator 
at midsummer. It takes courage, on a cold 
morning before sunrise, to leave a warm bed to 
start a fire in one of these stoves; but when the 
fire is fully aroused, cold is put out of the ques¬ 
tion, or at least out of doors. 
After a hot supper we put on our coats and 
furs and went out into the night. I had the 
same feeling of reverence and quiet that I have 
in going into a dimly-lighted cathedral. The 
stars flickered on high, the snow gleamed below, 
on every side mountain peaks guarded the nar¬ 
row valley. In the spruce woods, which reach 
from the road back to Paugus, the darkness was 
intense. We listened. At first there seemed 
to be no sound to hear. Then the whisper of 
Swift River came out of the north, and the bark 
of a dog far up the valley told of a fox prowling 
too near the farmyard. Suddenly, from a bank 
of silver light back of Carrigain, two long 
tongues of pallid fire shot upward into the sky 
and trembled there, only to disappear as 
abruptly as they came. Although the dim au¬ 
roral glow stayed in the north for some time, I 
saw no more radiating light. 
