the tread
and coating the pools and puddles and morasses with an ever-thickening
sheet of ice and the vegetation with a delicate tracery of silver; and
at length the day came when the anchor was lifted and the _Flying Fish_
moved some few miles out to sea to enable her occupants to witness the
final disappearance of the sun beneath the southern horizon. Some
anxiety had been experienced by the travellers for the last few days, as
clouds had been gathering in the sky, with every indication of a speedy
change of weather, and it was feared that the sight, which they had long
been promising themselves, would, after all, be denied them; but at the
last moment, or rather at the last hour, fortune proved favourable to
them; the cloud-bank broke up along the south-western horizon, the
vapours grouped themselves into a series of imposingly picturesque
masses, all aflame with the most gorgeous tints of sunset, and from a
little after eleven o'clock until shortly after noon the thin golden
upper edge of the luminary's disc was visible sweeping imperceptibly
along the purple horizon, until finally, as it reached the point of
disappearance, it glimmered feebly for a moment, and, whilst the
travellers stood watching it bare-headed, sank out of sight. The Arctic
day was over, and the six months of night and winter had set in. Not,
it must be understood, that darkness set in immediately--far from it;
for several succeeding days there ensued a weird, delicious, magic, and
ever-deepening twilight; but by the eighth day after the sun's final
disappearance this also had vanished, and night reigned with undisputed
sway.

And now, too, winter laid its icy hand with unrelenting grasp upon this
beauteous polar island; not, however, to desolate it with storm and
howling tempest and the deadly cold with which he visits less favoured
climes, but only to add newer and more unaccustomed beauties to the
scene. It is true that for the first fortnight after the disappearance
of the sun the weather wore a more or less unsettled aspect. The sky
became overcast with a canopy of cloud which, light and fleecy at first,
steadily increased in density; and at length, on the travellers emerging
from the pilot-house one morning after breakfast, they found the
motionless air thick with falling snow, which, settling noiselessly
down, had already covered the deck to a depth of some three inches. The
darkness was of course intense, so much so, indeed, that i